Recommitting

After another difficult morning on the scale, I joined up with Weight Watchers again. It was something of an impulse, but I'm really excited about it now. The last couple of times I tried to diet, I was working and going to school, and too stressed out to stick with it. I think this is good timing for me. I have time now to research, plan meals, and shop right. And I'm excited about the shopping, too. Now that we go to Smith's, it's a lot easier for me to shop for fresh, healthy ingredients. I love that store so much. My previous experience has been mostly limited to Wal-Mart, and Smith's couldn't be more different. You can tell the employees actually care about their work, and the deli, produce, and butcher areas all look incredibly fresh and inviting.

Anyway, I just made a delicious egg salad with lettuce and tomato for lunch, and opted out of my (first) diet coke of the day in favor of a nice big water. It feels good to be healthy.

Home Improvement

Brit started a little painting project a couple of days ago to decorate a wall in our basement next to the computers (yes, multiple). He worked really hard on the outline and the beginning parts, and then I kinda took over with detail work and tiny shadows. Unintentionally, I took over the project to the point where Brit texted me last night saying, "I kinda want to finish it, but I don't want to screw it up for you." I finally convinced him to finish working on his own project, and I feel bad that I took it over so completely, but he did and it turned out great.

And this morning at 1 AM on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, Brit finished the mural on our wall:

Does it make me very lame if I like it A LOT? The inherent pirateness and symbolism combine into one burning package of awesome.

The panorama shot of our (still very messy) basement where the mural resides:

And some shots of the work in progress:
I'm really glad this turned out to be a family project. And I'm immensely pleased with the final product. And will be even more pleased when my basement is put back together. But for now... yay!

Yo-Yo Puppy

Here's how you deal with an over-energetic puppy:

One person is upstairs in the kitchen or living room. The other is on the other side of the house, and down in the basement. Take turns calling the dog to you, having her run all the way across the house and up and down the stairs, over and over again. Nobody has to move, and the crazy puppy burns off quite a bit of energy. Proceed to blog while exercising your dog in your pajamas.

Comcast vs DirectTV

Generally speaking, I'm one to go for the "good deal." Money matters, and I sacrifice what I really want to get the best value. When it comes to TV, however, I'm quickly changing my tune. We had DirectTV at our old apartment, but cancelled when we moved because we are paying for basic Comcast in our HOA. And obviously, I don't want to double-pay for TV I barely watch. I'm starting to think it's worth the money, though. Certainly once we're not so tight, I'll go back to DirectTV even if we're throwing money away to Comcast. Let me tell you just some of the multiple reasons the satellite is so much better:

• Customer Service. My relationship with Comcast started badly right from the beginning, when I called to figure out how to turn on Closed Captioning, and the idiot Customer Service lady never bothered to ask me about my TV model, but gave me a 10 minute run-around of idiocy before I finally asked her "Ok, is there no way to turn it on through the cable box? No? Just through the TV? Ok I already tried that, it doesn't work, thanks for nothing."
• The digital channel guide, as with most guides, shows every channel possible- not just the ones you get. And doesn't even try to indicate which ones you get. So if you try to scroll through the guide, looking for good shows, you're more than likely to find something great, try to go watch it, and see "You don't recieve this channel." Over and over and over again. DirectTV has a wonderful guide menu option, where the default channel guide is your list of favorites. It took a while to whittle the list down to channels I like and channels I get, but after that, TV watching was smooth as anything. Comcast has a difficult-to-use favorites guide, and you have to select the favorites menu every time you go to the channel guide, and then it starts over at channel 1. VERY irritating.
• With DTV, when you fast forward through the commercials then hit play, it jumps back a few seconds to compensate for reflex delay. With C, you inevitably have to back up after getting to the end of the commercials, and several seconds into the show. Small, but irritating.
• The DVR on C is almost unusable. Coming to the start of all the new seasons, I've wanted to throw my cable box out the window almost every time I try to set the DVR. When I try to set a series recording, there is no option to choose the channel. I had to go back and manually tell the DVR on at least 3 shows to record from the primary network, as opposed to some channel nobody's ever heard of that only plays reruns. We nearly missed a few season premiers that way.
• It also likes to record reruns of new episodes. This is not a huge problem, but it got irritating after the 4th time I cancelled the recording of "Shawn has the Yips" and it decided to undo my cancel.
• The instant memory on the DVR only goes back something like 30 minutes. That seems like not a big deal... and I guess it's not... but I'm used to DTV which had something like 2 hours of memory you could rewind to if you stayed on the same channel. It was nice, if I turned on the TV in the middle of a movie I wanted to watch, or wanted to go back and watch some shows that were just on. It was also nice because it would stay paused for a very long time.

There are several more reasons I hate comcast, but I'll stop there. I don't know who has the better deal or more channels, but when Brit starts working and we're rolling in the dough, I'll definitely be splurging to go back to DirectTV's easy and comfortable user interface. It just causes so much less irritation in my life.

Decorating

One of the things I was most excited about in owning my own home was painting. I love colors. Unfortunately, the entire concept of painting and decorating has caused me a huge amount of unforeseen stress. We have the main accent wall done, and the kitchen, and I love them both. But now I need to come up with a color for basically all the rest of the main floor, and I'm terrified I'm going to screw it up. I have NO sense of style whatsoever. And any color I choose is going to be present in HUGE amounts with our vaulted ceilings. I don't want it to be ugly, or weird, or too dark, or clash with the other colors. I don't know how to find a balance of fun color without overdoing it and looking like an exploded rainbow. It's like when I was a teenager, and I needed a second opinion before I could even dress myself, but so much worse, because this is my HOUSE. I might like it, but what if people are coming over and going "Wow. This is an ugly house."? I'm terrified!

So basically what I'm trying to say is, does anyone want to come over and paint and decorate for me?