Random thoughts about life, kids, books, food, health, pregnancy & birth, religion & spirituality, politics...
Also easily summed up as "whining about sugar since 2005"
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Lucky 13 and Counting Giveaways
I stumbled on to a new blog a few months ago. Sandi writes Lucky Thirteen and Counting. She is a thirtysomething almost-ex-Mormon divorced and remarried mom to 14 kids. Four of the kids are "home-grown" and the rest are adopted. Several have special needs. Sandi is the opposite of me in many ways, but she is always raw and honest, and I instantly felt a connection to her.
Now, Sandi is offering a set of great giveaways. She has asked each of the 16 people in her household what their favorite thing is. They have given their answers on this post. Each month she will (try to) give away one of these favorite things. You enter the contest by leaving a comment on the Favorites post. She will draw a name and contact you by email. She will then call you on the phone and you will have 25 seconds to answer a question about her family/blog. If you get it right, you win the big prize. If you get it wrong, you win a $50 gift card to Amazon. Full rules are in this post.
I don't get anything or benefit in any way from posting this. I just thought more people deserved to know about Sandi! She currently has no ads on her blog and these giveaways are financed out of her generosity :-)
Our stake had a movie night, with each ward contributing a short film. The youth in our ward made our movie, called West Provo Story. I thought it was hilarious. I think you'll like it, particularly if you're a Twilight, Star Wars, or The Princess Bride fan.
The movie should be hosted at http://www.westprovostory.com/ but I cannot get the site to work.
I just found out about a great new online health food store buying club. It's basically Costco + Whole Foods + Amazon. You pay a yearly membership fee, just like Costco. Also like Costco, you get very low prices -- lower than you will find anywhere else online and definitely lower than you'll find at the health food store. You shop online, and your order is delivered to your door in a green polka dot box! What could be more awesome than that? If you spend $150 per order, shipping is free. If you spend less, it's only $9 (flat fee)! I think that is fantastic.
Green Polka Dot Box has products from about 50 companies right now, but they will have products from 150 companies within the next few months. They are starting with shelf-stable dried goods. Then they'll add frozen products, and eventually they will even have produce!! The day they start delivering produce is the day I never leave my house to grocery shop again!
Check it out by clicking here -->
You can refer people to the store and get 'rewards' by doing so. If you refer 10 or 20 people who shop regularly, you could even get all your groceries for free! Basically, you earn a percentage of the amount your referrals spend. The more you refer, the higher the percentage goes. They want people to sign up ASAP (of course), so there is an incentive to sign up now -- if you sign up by May 31st, you will automatically get the highest percentage reward, no matter how many you refer. Typically, you'd have to refer 20 people to earn 10% rewards. But if you sign up by May 31st, you earn 10% rewards even if you only ever refer 1 person. I have signed up already, so if you click on the graphic/link in this post, you will be one of my referrals :-)
If you don't want to bother with referrals and rewards, you can sign up as a club member and still get the same prices. Your annual membership fee will be cheaper too. If you want to wait until you see the full lineup of products a couple of months down the road, that is awesome too. The only difference is that you'd have to refer more people to get the full rewards percentage. But if you don't care about the referrals/rewards, there's no difference at all.
Even before I found out about the rewards (I usually don't get into that kind of stuff) I was so excited for this! Cheap health food store products delivered right to my door?! Sign me up! I HATE shopping, especially when I've gone to 3 stores already (1 health food store has this cheaper, one has that, and don't forget the regular grocery store too!) with 3 kids who are starving and tired. I think The Green Polka Dot Box is going to be really big, and I can't wait to start shopping!
I've never been one to gain weight. I've fluctuated in weight quite a lot, due to pregnancies and nursing and things, but I don't recall ever gaining weight outside of pregnancy. Last December, my sister sent out a family email about doing Body for Life so that we don't gain weight over the holidays. I was thinking "??".
I've gone all winter wearing the same pants - no apparent change through Thanksgiving or Christmas. But now, suddenly within the last month, my pants are fitting quite differently! Two months ago, everything was loose and I figured I'd have to go down a size soon. Now everything is tight.
So I guess this means it's time to actually start exercising instead of thinking about it. Last summer I decided I was going to become a runner. So I started walking/jogging. I completed 9 weeks of a couch to 5K program, which got me going from 1 minute jogging at a time during the first week to 30 straight minutes of jogging by the end. I did not make it to 5K distance because I have to run VERY SLOW to be able to go for 30 minutes. I could walk faster -- literally. I abandoned that effort in October and haven't done anything since. I rented a TaeBo video from Netflix in November and didn't touch it until last Friday.
I guess there could be one other option, but I don't think it's very likely. I thought my husband was kind of ambivalent about having more kids right at the moment, but apparently he's not ambivalent, because when I told him about my pants issue he got all excited and asked if I had been feeling sick and was waggling his eyebrows a lot :-P
I did start a fitness blog last summer, but I never wrote anything in it. I'll try to flesh it out a little and then maybe share the link. Then I can quit writing in it again, just like my Beans & Rice blog.
The other night after the kids went to bed, I needed a treat. So I made brownie batter, without the eggs. (I will eat raw eggs, but only fresh ones from a trusted local farm. I didn't want to be eating raw eggs that had been sitting in brownie batter for several days.) I added a little extra water to compensate for the egginess. But it was late and I measured wrong, so then I had to add flour. It was still pretty thin. I put it in the fridge and the kids and husband never discovered it. I've had a delicious brownie batter treat every night since then!
So I've been listening to a great song lately: (warning: none of the songs below are appropriate for Molly Mormons, including myself)
Don't they have the greatest hair? The song came out in 1993, so I guess this is mid-90's former-glam-metal hair.
What troubles me is this -- What on earth does "With an ironclad fist I wake up and French kiss the morning" mean??
How about "This hotel bar hangover whiskey's gone dry"? That's part of the bridge, which strangely enough does not show up in that music video above. Weird.
Apparently, other people have been baffled by the lyrics too, because in this 2003 version, he changes both of them: "With an ironclad fist, I wake up and French kiss each morning" (Still don't know what an ironclad fist is) "The hotel bar hangover whiskey ran dry" (makes marginally more sense)
Bon Jovi is one of the acts I would love to see in concert. I remember my first encounter with Bon Jovi songs. In 1986, the Monkees were popular, as it was their 20th anniversary concert tour. They also had a few new songs that year. I was 5 years old and LOVED the Monkees. I desperately wanted to go to their concert, but it was way too much money for the whole family to go to, and I was only FIVE, so it wasn't like I could just hop on down there myself. I would watch MTV all the time, waiting to catch a Monkees song. I have no idea how my mom was OK with this. I remember hearing Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer and thinking that it must be a good song because it was about praying.
If you thought that 90's hair was good, check this out:
I really hope 80's glam metal hair comes back (but for women), because my hair totally looks like that when I wake up in the morning.
The other 80's metal group I love is Def Leppard.
My favorite is probably Pour Some Sugar On Me:
My freshman roommates always used to listen to Love Bites, particularly when love wasn't going so well for one of them:
Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad is probably my favorite Def Leppard ballad:
Other than the brief encounter with Living on a Prayer in 1986, the real reason I got into Bon Jovi and Def Leppard is that I had a boyfriend who liked them. Around 1995, he made me a mix tape with several Bon Jovi and Def Leppard songs on it. (Surely if you had a boyfriend in the 80s or 90s, he made you a mix tape too.) I've liked some of their songs ever since. My husband was a teenager in the 80s, so naturally he LOVES Bon Jovi and Def Leppard. He used to own all their CDs, but after we got married, we decided to throw out all our secular music. Bye-bye Bon Jovi and Def Leppard. Fortunately we now have subscriptions to Rhapsody music service, so we can listen to Bon Jovi all the time. Rhapsody used to have all of Def Leppard's music, but they removed it. Sad.
I could totally rock Karaoke night if I got to sing Bon Jovi or Def Leppard. Sometimes I listen to Bon Jovi to keep myself energized at work (if I'm doing something that doesn't require much concentration), and I have to really watch it so I don't bust out singing at the top of my lungs. It's great to do at home though!
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Unrelated question - for those of you using feed readers, do my posts come through several times each? My typical writing method is to write the post, go through it several times, then post it. Then I find more things to change, probably 2 or 3 times, requiring several re-publishes. Do all the versions show up in your feed readers?
I once had a job where we needed to get our work reviewed by the local City. Our company eventually discovered an interesting trick to get the work through the review process with fewer revisions from the City -- send the women, in dresses or skirts. When the women wore classy (not slutty) dresses and took the work in to be reviewed, it was generally passed off with no problem. If the men took it, or if the women dressed as usual (slacks), there would typically be revisions required. I thought this was quite interesting. We had one woman who would never be caught dead in a dress. However, when she needed her work reviewed by the City, out came a nice skirt. I want to emphasize that these women were always gracious and classy. This wasn't a sleazy thing on the part of the women.
One of my male coworkers commented that when he had taken some work to the City for review, the reviewer sat there flipping pages, as his eyes tracked a woman walking all the way across the room. My coworker didn't mind, since the work was passed off since the reviewer didn't even bother LOOKING at it.
In both cases, I would say it was the women who got the work done. I'm not taking a position on what this means, because it's obviously a landmine of sexism and other gender issues. I'm merely relating what happened.
