Coming Up For Air. Holy Cow, It's September!

I’m still here! I didn’t decide to move to some far-flung tropical destination without high-speed internet access, or get pecked to death by a flock of frustrated fowl at CK’s house…no…I’ve just been…busy, procrastinating. Summer has flown by. It didn’t help that spring didn’t actually start until about mid-June. The snow finally melted, the mosquitoes came out and we never did get any landscaping done. Let’s just say we are having a hard time reconciling ourselves to the $65 an hour they want to bill us for digging in dirt and laying pavers. Never mind that the entire bid came in over budget and the landscape company didn’t seem to want our business enough to negotiate a better deal, or our landscape designer finally sent us a PDF of the wrong plans. Back to square one. We did take a 10 day vacation to Grand Cayman with Big and Lil’ Toby. The men all got their scuba certifications and I enjoyed a few blessed days alone on the beach with a book and my snorkel gear. We had a great time, beautiful weather and made some great memories. 10 days was a huge splurge, we spent 5 days on the far end of Seven Mile Beach and 5 days up at Rum Point. Being our third trip to GC, we really wanted to try the last two sides of the island we’d not been on before. Both locations were great and had a lot to offer, but the snorkeling at Rum Point has really deteriorated in the past few years. I was quite disappointed. Snorkeling at our 7MB reef was much better. We also did the Queen Elizabeth Botanical Gardens and Stingray City. We leave in two weeks for a quick 5 day trip to Orlando. We both really love Universal’s Haunted Halloween at Universal Studios. We’ve been a couple of times and it’s a blast. This week we got our itinerary for our Danube cruise in December. I love the “enjoy a leisurely breakfast before departing the ship to your departing airport” bit. We disembark in Passau, Germany, and have an 8:00AM flight out of Munich. Two hours away. So I’m not entirely sure how leisurely breakfast is going to be when we have to get off the boat at 4AM. I’m thinking we should disembark the night before and get to a hotel in Munich and then get to the airport in the morning without so much stress. We get back home on Christmas Eve. I am incredibly excited about that trip. We are going to spend a couple of days in Budapest before the cruise even begins. I’m happy to report that I’m surprisingly down 29 pounds since early May when I overhauled my eating habits. I’m following a combination low-carb diet with FODMAPS diet. Staying away from items with FODMAPS has done wonders for my IBS and sticking to low carbs has done wonders for the rest of me. I feel really good and motivated and not terribly deprived. I did go through a period of mourning or frustration over having to give up so many foods in order to keep my lower GI tract from waging war, but I’m learning my tolerances (naturally fermented sauerkraut = BAD! Fresh blueberries = GOOD!) and finding a happy medium between little splurges and monk-like abstinence. I have a weight loss goal in mind, and I’m confident I’ll get there. Well, that’s all the news that’s fit to print today. I’ll be back sooner rather than later. (Oh and the chicken killing thing wasn’t so bad after all. I wasn’t expected to wring any necks. I was on lunch and dinner duty for the crew and ran a wicked vacuum sealer!) *edited to add: I am not sure why the formatting on this is so funky. I am viewing with real paragraphs and not one giant run-on paragraph. Am too lazy and too tired to fix it today. Endure. Thanks.