There is no Alanna, only Zuul!

I kid, but it's true that I haven't been feeling like myself lately. All I want to do is overload on sugary carbs. Yum and yuck all rolled into one. At least now that I am conscious of it, I can try to manage it. I've got to start tracking, you know, like I should be doing because I'm paying for Weight Watchers. At this rate, I'll never lose the baby fat and I don't even want to think about the fat from before Alexander came. Yowzers!

On the upside of things, I did quit my big money gym and I joined Curves and am now paying less than half what I used to. I also have been going 3 times a week during my lunch break. It's a tight squeeze, but I don't have to do it in the afternoons when I prefer to spend my time with this little guy:

He's covered in green beans and bananas in this picture...but he's cute anyway, so who cares?

I also bought myself a new camera. My old camera was working fine, but the time between pictures was excruciatingly long for using with a baby, so my mom and I went to one of those big box stores...specifically the one that is going out of business and took a look at cameras. A nice man showed me a really cool camera that was on sale, but as it turns out they were out of them. I found the same camera online at Amazon for less. So I bought it and an 8 gig memory stick. I take tons and tons of pictures now. I'm loving it.

In other news, poor Reuben's OCD and separation anxiety was getting worse. When we would leave him alone in his doggy safe area in our new house, he would rub his nose on the door until it bled. When we put up a nice doggy gate, he bit into it and spent the hour trying to (and finally succeeding) jump over it. This is a familiar space to him... we spend time as a family in this space. We tried more exercise and spending more time in the doggy safe area to no avail. His vet decided to change his meds. My poor sweet doggie is now on Prozac. Real, human Prozac. He's been on it for almost 2 weeks and we see subtle differences: He jumps readily into the car, when before we had to cajole him a little bit. His turn and scratch OC behavior on his dog bed has lessened. What's even better is that he's the same silly dog that we all know and love.

This is all I can think of for now. Perhaps I will be back later!

Just for fun!

Trying to be smarter

I am trying to be smarter these days about food and money. As I'm sure you all know, both are so hard to be smart about. I am taking good steps forward. Now that we're mostly unpacked, Chris and I have been cooking dinner at home, and bringing lunch most days. We even stopped buying cookies. Instead, if we want cookies we bake them ourselves, but not the whole batch. We freeze at least half the dough so we can't binge eat cookies. So food is getting better in that sense...and so is money as a result.

Money is a touchy subject for me. I feel as if things are out of control...they actually aren't, but with the move, the new house and Christmas gifts just purchased last credit card statement, things can seem overwhelming. I did quite my big fancy $102 a month gym (and that was with a discount) and joined Curves, which is much cheaper and I can go during my lunch...it's that close to work. I'm still doing Starbucks only once per work week...I will occasionally have some on the weekend if I'm meeting a friend for coffee or something, but that's still saving me cash.

I don't think I'm doing the resolution thing this year...I find that I never fulfill them and I find that depressing. I do want to set goals for myself. One goal for 2009 is to cut my non-mortgage debt down by a minimum of 20%. This included student loans, credit cards (with home construction stuff on it), personal loan and car loan. That is a lot of $$ and if I can make some of it disappear, I am going to do it!