October 31, 2007
Writing about my weight loss journey made me start thinking about some of the current goals I have. I briefly mentioned a few (weight loss, marathon, leaving Chile) but I want to document them here to help keep myself accountable. Feel free to ask me about any of them at any given time.
1. Save up $40,000 by November, 2009.
2. Leave Chile for our trip around the world no later than November, 2009.
3. Pay off $5,000 a year on my student loans.
4. Run a marathon before we leave Chile. The marathon doesn’t have to necessarily be in Chile, I’m not even sure if they have a big one here. I know there is one on Isla de Pascua (Easter Island) but it’s really expensive to get there. Easter Island is to Chile what Hawaiai is to the U.S. And the biggest factor is that they only accept 40 people each year. I don’t really fancy coming in 39th of out of 40th in my first (and possibly only) marathon.
5. Weigh 56 kilos by December 16th. I currently weigh 60.6 kilos. If you don’t know how much that is in pounds use the Google converter, it’s the coolest. Just type in Google, convert 56 kilos to pounds and the answer will come up. You can also use it as a calculator. I guess most of you probably knew that by now but I only learned about that insanely useful feature a few months ago. Anyways, this goal is a joint goal I’m doing with Raquelin from Three Day Blog.
6. And last but not least, I really want to start a diet/fitness/health/celebrity weight related topics blog. Why haven’t I already done this, you ask? It’s because I can not, for the life of me think of a name!!!! I’ve been pondering for like a month and can’t come up with anything. Suggestions are welcome.
So those are the things I’m going to achieve in the upcoming years.
October 29, 2007
The last couple of weeks have been filled with stories from the distant past. Ok, not so distant, my crazy Chilean wedding was only a couple of months ago and the whole losing 50 pounds thing was about 3 years ago. Time to bring us back to the future. Or today.
S. still has not finished at his current job. He can’t leave until the construction he’s working on is finished and it’s behind schedule. What does this mean? We will not be leaving Santiago. Those of you who have been reading my blog will know that I was sooooooooooo excited to get out of here. So we now have to come up with a new plan for keeping me sane and out of the clutches of my mother in law. Seriously, I love her, but I just need my space. So we may go back to the original plan, which was moving to the upstairs apartment of our house and fixing it up.
Or, we may get an apartment, either by ourselves or with a friend who also wants to move out of his house. The thing is, both the friend and my husband will be working for the next four months right near where they live, so it doesn’t make sense for us to up and move way far away and give them both longer commutes. So S. and I may fix up the upstairs apartment, move up there for 4-5 months until he’s done with his next construction site and then go from there. At that point we’ll either move to an apartment with or without our friend…or the company will relocate us outside of Santiago. The company has said that the probabilities of us moving outside Santiago after Feb. are almost 100% but then again, the probabilities of us moving outside Santiago now were 2 in 3 and look where that got us.
My celeb gossip blog job is going excellent! My boss has a computer with a bad battery and it died the other day, so right now I’m trying to handle things on my own. It’s a little nervewracking writing for some 90,000 people a day! If I make a typo, someone is bound to notice! So I have definitely been keeping busy…but all in all, everything is really good.
And now, to spice things up a bit, I thought we’d do a little contest. I’m pretty sure I have never mentioned on here where the url of this blog came from. Can anybody figure out where I got the name? Leave an answer in the comments section and if you are the first person to answer correctly you can email me 2 or 3 of your favorite photos and I will retouch them, or spice up the colors, give them borders, take out background people or objects that shouldn’t be in the picture…anything you want. I’ll Photoshop the heck out of your pictures if you get the answer right
Hint, the answer comes from U.S. pop culture, not Chilean, even though the URL is in Spanish.
October 28, 2007
Continuing with the self portrait update, here are a few more days.
Day 49:
I’ll be the first to admit I have really short, stubby, dinosaur arms. This makes taking my own self portrait incredibly hard! I can’t reach out far enough away to get much of my face in the picture…and focusing, let’s not even go there. Which is why, as you can see, I focused on my forehead for this shot snapped after a run.
Day 50:
Flashes make everybody look ghostly white. Don’t hate.
Day 51:
Again, short arms are a serious impediment. Here I am at a park in Santiago. Parque de las Esculturas in case you want to visit next time you’re in the area. I really wanted to do an SP with the pretty purple flowers in the background but it didn’t turn out quite as I wanted. And I look like I have Tom Cruise style bangs but that’s just the wind. I’d rather have Katie’s haircut if I were to be imitating a celeb hair-do anytime soon.
Tomorrow I’ll update with pictures from today and yesterday, and then I’m caught up! Woohoo, and I vow never to get that behind on uploading my pics again.
October 27, 2007
I’m so far behind on uploading my self portraits! I don’t know how I’m going to make through the whole 365 days…I’m already sick of my own face! And I have got to start uploading these as I take them instead of leaving them all on my camera for days. I’m about a week behind, but I’m just going to put up a few for today and I’ll put up the rest tomorrow after I’ve had a chance to run them through Photoshop
Day 45:
Look hard, the reflection of my hands and camera is in there. That is my reflection in the window of the train while the scenery blurs by. The picture was taken last Friday, on my way back home from Talca after spending a day with the lovely Raybelles, my only girlfriend in Chile! We had such a wonderful afternoon together and I also kind of fell in love with the trains here in Chile. Even though the organization that runs them is one of the most corrupt in the whole country, I loved being able to travel comfortably and enjoy the scenery the whole way there-pure trash and poverty on the way through any cities we passed and then beautiful rolling green hills everywhere else. I actually meant to do a whole post on the day but never seemed to find the time.
Day 46:
This is me after a run. I know the photo is severely overexposed but I really just wanted to get my self portrait of the day out of the way, take a shower and climb in bed. I didn’t have time to manually adjust the settings on my camera to make sure everything came out properly
Day 47:
I asked S. to take a few pictures of me out on our patio at night for these shots. The lighting is from a flourscent overhead bulb hanging right over me. I liked the way these came out because they’re a bit different from all the typical boring shots of me in our room that I always take.
Day 48:
I could not get this damn orange started! Even with a knife, that thing’s peel was like an armored shell that repelled my every effort to get in. I thought for sure that it was going to be the best, most delicious, juiciest orange in the world. Why else would Mother Nature have gone to such great lengths to protect it? But, alas, I bit in, and it sucked. After all the effort it wasn’t even good, it had a bitter taste. Stupid orange.
October 26, 2007
Ask and ye shall receive. You wanted before pictures, here is the best I can do. I didn’t bring my boxes upon boxes of pictures with me to Chile so I had to steal this from a friend’s Facebook. It’s not a full body shot, but I think even just in the face it’s pretty easy to see that I looked a lot different before. The picture was taken after I had already lost 10-15 pounds. If I ever come across better befores I will post them.
October 25, 2007
In case you missed them, get caught up by reading Part I and Part II
So for my Biokinetics and Conditioning class I had to make a plan and it had to actually work and be proved by my results. Pretty sneaky way to make sure students don’t cheat! I decided that was as good a motivation as any to start losing weight. We were learning all about the exercise side of things in class and I did have a pretty good idea of what a good workout consists of from my years of weightlifting for cheerleading and distance training for soccer. But the food part…oh the food part…
Seriously, doesn’t ketchup count as a vegetable? With fries…that’s two veggies right there! Right? RIGHT???
Yeah, I really didn’t know what I was doing. So I just decided to continue eating similar to how I was, but to cut everything in half. Instead of eating a whole bagel with cream cheese for breakfast I only ate one side of it and ate the other side for lunch. Instead of ordering the medium smoothie for dinner, I had the small. And so on, and so on, you get the picture.
Also, I started cutting back on drinking. At first I just started drinking lower cal cocktails like rum and diet coke, or disgusting low carb beer. Eventually a good workout became even more important to me and I cut drinking out completely because I realized it makes it so much harder to be healthy when you’re drinking so many calories!
For class we did workouts twice a week, each one student run. A lot of them were tough because the athletes would take things they did with their strength coaches and turn it into their own program. And I started running/walking at night on the school’s track. I told myself that at the start I would go on the track for at least an hour and of that hour I would run as much as possible. In the beginning I could run about 20 minutes, then I would walk the last 40. But that quickly changed. I began to notice results weekly in the distance I could go. Pretty soon I was running the full 60 minutes. I think because I was so athletic in high school and I had only taken less than a year off, it really didn’t take my body too long to adjust to higher intensity activities again.
Running became an OBSESSION for me. I made sure to fit it into my day no matter. Even if I didn’t get home from work until 2am in the morning, I’d still drag my tired feet to the track to fit in my hour’s worth of workout. In two months I lost about 10 more pounds on top of the 10 that I had already lost from stopping consumption of regular pop. My body was also becoming more muscular and I was loving the changes I saw in the mirror. I felt so good and people really began to take notice. Then the real deciding factor came.
I tried out for the UT cheerleading team. I made it, quite easily, as the team wasn’t established or at all competitive. I saw the uniforms we were going to have to wear. They were your typical belly bearing cheer skank uniforms. I was horrified. I may have lost twenty pounds but I wasn’t ready to prance around in something that small with my stomach hanging out. No way Jose!
My resolve was now twice as steely. I would go to cheer practice (not very hard at all with this new team) and afterwards I would go to the track. I started running longer distances, between 8 and 10 miles a day. Getting in shape felt SO good. And oddly enough it inspired me to eat a lot better too. I wanted to be able to run faster, and I knew that I was able to do that when I was properly nutriated and hydrated. My own body that had never wanted to touch anything green before, began craving veggies. I no longer felt the urge to eat greasy foods like hamburgers or fries because I knew I would feel sick and sluggish when I ran with that food in my belly. So I guess you could say that I never technically went on a specific diet. Running became like a totally addictive drug to me and to feed the habit I had to eat right. The pounds continued coming off. I lost at a steady rate of about 6-8 pounds a month. My body changed completely. For starters I had cheekbones. That was a shocking discover. But the most crazy thing was the day I realized that I had boy muscles. You know, like a shadow where the hip bone sticks out a little bit. Mine weren’t jutting out like a crazy anorexic model or anything of the matter, but you could see definition there and in the rest of my stomach. I also had a two pack. Woohoo for the line down the middle of my stomach! I felt SO hot! I don’t have that line anymore and I want it back.
In cheerleading, I was finally able to do backhandsprings again. I started coaching a soccer team and I would practice all the drills with them. I loved being a hands on coach in better shape than her high school aged girls! My body felt so amazing. I was only sleeping like 6 hours a night yet I still woke up refreshed every morning. Now I need 9 hours and I still don’t feel half as good in the morning. Seriously, it’s incredible how well the body functions when you take good care of it. Besides feeling great, I looked great too!
Of course there were days when I still struggled with old eating patterns. I would binge eat massive amounts of food and not even taste it as I shoved it into my face. I still do that sometimes and I don’t know why. I would skip workouts, but I made sure to never beat myself up over it. If I didn’t go Wednesday, I just had to make sure to go to the track on Thursday. You really can’t expect perfection from yourself in a diet and exercise plan or you’re just setting yourself up to fail.
And in my class, I got an A+. When we did the two mile run again, I beat every single girl in my class by a looooong shot, even the ones who were college athletes. I lapped the smokers during the run and I even finished ahead of several of the guys. I was so proud.
Losing 50 pounds was hard. But, not that hard. Sure, I did have to completely dedicate myself to a workout program and healthy eating habits. But, I didn’t deny myself food that I wanted. I didn’t freak if I skipped a day of running. In the end, everything I did fit into my lifestyle. And I kept up the crazy physique and fitness for about a year and a half. Then I came to Chile for study abroad and quickly regained about 20 pounds. I’ve lost that weight and gained it back and lost it again like three times now, but every time I gain, I gain back less and I lose a little more. I see them as small battles that I occasionally lose. But, I’m definitely winning the war.
Right now I have a mission. I want to get back to running 8-10 miles a day again. I want my body to feel that good. Then I want to train for and run a marathon. It’s on my life to do list, and right now it’s looking like the most doable thing on that list (yeah, I have tough goals for myself to meet).
I’m also losing 15 pounds with a blog friend, Rachel. Having support is the best way to do anything! I actually wish my husband were more supportive. I have the same problem as Ordinary Girl. Our spouses don’t like to eat healthy. If I want to make a fruit smoothie for dessert with frozen unsweetened strawberries and lowfat milk, he wants to add a cup of sugar to the thing. If I want Subway for lunch, he wants Chinese food. And so on, and so on. Btw, does anybody know why Chinese people are so skinny when their restaurants serve such bad for your food?
I’ve noticed that my traffic has really gone up with these last three posts. Apparently people are obsessed with weight loss, who knew? Anyways, lurkers, if you’re reading and not commenting, I hate you. Just kidding! But if you’re here just for the weight loss, I have to admit that it’s not a subject I frequently blog about. My advice to you would be to check out what is hands down the best weight loss blog in the world, PastaQueen. I didn’t know of PQ and her Half of Me blog when I started losing weight. But I have a feeling that if we had been friends at the time she would’ve said, “I’ll see your 50 lbs and I’ll raise you 100 lbs.” She’s impressive people, go read her blog now, thank me later.
And if you still need more reading, check out my diet/fitness/health/celebrity/weight loss blog here.
October 24, 2007
Let’s see, where were we….
Oh yeah, I was in high school living a pleasantly plump, quite happy existence as a star athlete. Like I said before, in high school losing weight really wasn’t a huge issue for me because I was satisfied with what my body could do, rather than judging it based on appearance.
I got to college and everything changed.
I attended the University of Tampa. If anyone has ever been to Tampa you’ll know there are basically two demographics that live there. One half of the population is composed of people over 190 years old who have sunbathed so much during their years of living in the Sunshine State that their wrinkles are at least 3 inches deep. The other half of the population is made up of college students/really, young rich families mostly coming from up North who were so repressed from years of winter coats, hats and boots, that they now want to show off as much skin as possible and therefore work out incessantly in order to have the body to show off. I was SHOCKED by how attractive everybody at my college was when I first got there. Maybe the reason I was never unhappy with my weight in high school was because I hadn’t realized girls could have six packs abs. No self respecting female at my high school ever walked around in low rider jeans and a shirt so small/tight it looked like my sports bra. Girls at UT went to their 8am classes like that. At first I really wasn’t bothered by the fact that my body looked nothing like that. In fact, my first year was spent lounging in the cafeteria (which has delicious food, btw) eating massive amounts of french fries and ice cream. I was also introduced to the wonders of alcohol and partying. Shots of tequila and nights spent playing cards (aka drinking games) were not doing wonders for my physique. I was no longer physically active so I went from working out pretty much every day of the year in high school to doing absolutely nothing in college. Unless you count walking around campus, drunkenly pulling the safety alarms and then running away from Security as exercise. Fun? YES. Healthy? Not so much.
To add to my growing weighty concerns, I started working as a waitress at an Italian restaurant that year. We got a free meal for every double shift we worked and I usually worked 4-5 doubles a week (yeah, I worked and partied MUCH more than I went to class. I actually would schedule myself at work during times I knew I had class just because it was so unnecessary to actually be there for the lectures). So I was eating HUGE plates of pasta, sipping on Coke (regular, GASP) out of the little cone cups at the beverage station on my downtime (and since the restaurant was well on it’s way to being out of business by the time I started there, we had a lot of those moments) and drinking really low-cal drinks every night like chocolate martini’s.
All the muscle I ever had turned to a blobby mass. I was really upset about how I looked and felt. I was tired all the time, and unable to do things I could do before. Like a simple backhandspring, for instance. I used to be able to do up to 20 in a row, I could traverse the length of the football field flipping. I tried to do one out in the common area in front of my dorm one night thinking it would be a piece of cake like always. My arms gave out and I fell on my head. Granted, I was drunk, so that probably wasn’t the best measure of success (note to self: although drunken gymnastics always sounds like such a fantastic idea it never ends pretty). I was horrified at what my body could no longer do. I used to be able to do backhandsprings even when I was too sick to walk (momentum people, it works wonders).
At my largest I’m sure I weighed more than 180 but I never got on the scale to find out. All I know is that my size 16 jeans were a too small. WAY too small. I didn’t buy new ones, I just wore sweatpants constantly and convinced myself it was the college style.
I decided I needed to lose weight. But, I had no idea how. Exercise was something I had always done with the end goal of winning. Individual sports were totally foreign to me, as was the concept of working out just to get yourself healthy or thinner, not because you were at practice with your teammates. And don’t even get me started on diet. I mean, bagels as big as my head are really healthy right? I was clueless.
The first thing I did was switch from regular Coke to Diet Coke. I lost 10 pounds instantly and I could fit back into my size 16’s. People started noticing the loss (although that might have more to do with the fact that I started dressing in real clothes again, rather than constant oversized hoodies and sweatpants). I felt good about my “diet,” and wanted to continue. I just wasn’t quite sure about the next step. Fortunately, I had just changed my major from International Business to Sports Management (GENIUS decision, btw, because there’s a huge market for people like me in a country where girls don’t play sports and even on men’s sports teams they’re too corrupt/macho/or totally lacking in funds and infrastructure to hire people who know what they’re doing). I signed up for fall classes and one of my requisites for Sports Management was a Biokinetics and Conditioning. I had NO clue what that meant but a friend told me that it was like field day back in elementary school, you got to go to class in workout clothes and compete with the other kids. The only thing missing was a blue ribbon for the winners. Well, she obviously had a different teacher than I got because my Biokinetics and Conditioning class was NOTHING like the gloriousness that was field day.
On the first day of class we had our fat measured with pinchers. In front of everybody. At UT most kids who are Sports Management majors also play on the school’s athletic teams (UT is a very competitive DII school). So in a class with boys who had 7% body fat and girls with 14% my 34% really stood out. We were told that almost our entire grade would be based upon creating a fitness plan based on the things we learned along the way in class, and proving that it worked by following our own fitness plan and measuring our results at the end of the semester. The next class was a two mile run, and we were told we would be doing the same at the end of the semester as well, to show our progress. I didn’t come in last. I beat a group of chain smokers who were also anorexically thin. How’s that for a win?!?
I finally realized that I really and truly was not even close to being able to call myself athletic anymore.
To be continued…
October 22, 2007
Squeaking past Seriously, How Am I Still Alive?: Random (sometimes dangerous) adventure I’ve had in Chile by 18 votes to 17, I present to you Not Chubby Anymore: How I got off my butt and lost 50 pounds.
I have a feeling this is going to be part I. Something tells me the whole story won’t fit into just one post.
To understand how someone loses weight, it’s helpful to know how he or she gained it in the first place. So let me take you back…way back. From birth I was chubby, and only liked unhealthy foods. I have vague memories of consuming whole sticks of butter with my brother, as well as chowing down on raw sugar by the cup full. Here I am at the tender age of 2 …already drowning my sorrows in mint chocolate chip ice cream…”Why me? Why me? One day I was all alone enjoying my mommy’s love all to myself, and the next thing I know, I have to share her lap with that squirmy little thing that never stops crying. WAAAAAH, LIFE IS HARD, I NEED ICE CREAM!”
It didn’t help that I was oddly proportioned. My legs were so short that my step dad once saw a picture of me when I was little and called me a butt with feet!
My earliest memory of thinking about weight related issues, was in 5th or 6th grade when all my friends were starting to reach the 100lb mark. It was a big deal. Every week a new friend would come to school screaming, “OMG, I get to start shopping in the juniors section, today I weighed 102lbs!” Hitting the triple digits was like a sign we were growing up. Only problem was, I think I reached that mark in like 4th grade. By the time they were all hitting the mark, I couldn’t remember the last time I had weighed that much. It was embarrassing. That was the first time I really thought about that fact that I was bigger than other little girls.
When I got into 7th grade I tried out for the cheerleading team. Out of more than 300 little girls who tried out, I got one of 40 coveted spots. I was ecstatic! We soon started practicing and our coaches began teaching us the basics of stunting (cheerleaders tossing other girls around up in the air for those of you who aren’t cheer lingo knowledgeable). The general principle was that in our big competition of the year every girl would be featured in at least one stunt. So we all would have our chance to shine as the flyer (the girl who’s getting bounced around like popcorn kernel in the microwave). I think the assumption was that at that age, we were all relatively the same size so we could all work in any stunt position, be it in the air or on the ground. I was so ashamed that when it was my turn to go up, the group could only manage a simple V-sit, the easiest of all stunts. I was too heavy to perform anything else. But, I was still a great cheerleader. My tumbling (gymnastics) was far more advanced than most of the girls, my jumps were powerful and I was good at stunting as a base (the girls who do the heavy lifting). I was strong and compact and that is how I’ve been described for most of my life.
In middle school I was anything but popular. I wasn’t unpopular. I was just…nothing. Nobody noticed me. There were boys that liked me, but they weren’t the ones that I liked. I had friends, but I wanted to be part of the cool kids group. It didn’t take me long to realize that beauty and being thin meant power, even at that young age. The girls in school who were the teacher’s favorites, who were chosen to represent the school for the Got Milk campaign, who the boys liked…they were slender. They bought their clothes from 5 7 9. I could never fit into anything at that damn store! They had highlights and wore designer jeans, neither of which I could afford. And the truth is that I longed to be smaller but I didn’t have the foggiest how one goes about losing weight.
The food I ate at home was the root of the problem. Mom, I’m not blaming you! I know you did the best you could. My mom worked full time and overtime hours to make ends meet as a single mom. She was also going back to school to get her Masters. Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of spare time on the agenda to make a home cooked meal. She would get home from class at 9:30pm and we’d call her begging to bring home McDonald’s or order us a pizza. We were so addicted to fast food, in fact, that once we actually went around to multiple places to gather together the best of the best. The world’s best fast food meal…curly fries from Arby’s, Shamrock shake from McDonald’s, hamburger from Burger King. Is it sad that I still remember that? My mom and my brother both ate that crap too, but those lucky dogs never gained, or if they did, didn’t gain much. I was the only one in the family who really struggled with my weight.
I continued gaining and by the time I was in 9th grade I wore a size 10 pants. But I remained highly involved in athletics. I was a very fit chubby girl, if that makes any sense. I tried out for the freshman cheer team and made the JV team. At my school cheerleading was extremely competitive. We did hardcore gymnastics and stunting, no dancing. Our practices shared a fitness coach with the football coach. And our varsity team ranked 1st or 2nd in the state every year. Cheerleading was 7-8 months out of the year, with 4 hour long practices every day of the week during competitive season. And on the off season, I played soccer, which I was also good at. I played varsity for 4 years, was captain for my last two years and MVP my senior year (yes, I’m bragging, but I’m proud of the fact that I was a great athlete).
I think that’s why my doctor never said anything to me. I only remember him showing me that my weight fell well outside the normal category on the growth chart. And whenever weight or size came up in the conversation, the only comments made to me by friends and family were things like, “You’re all muscle.” or, “You’re big boned.” I was a size 14, sometimes 16 by the time I graduated. But, I still really wasn’t concerned enough about my weight to actually do something about it. I think since my body could outperform a lot of skinny people’s bodies when it came to athletic performance I just wasn’t too worried about health. If I really wanted to lose weight I suppose I wouldn’t have come home from every soccer practice and eaten fast food. If I didn’t eat fast food, I cooked the only thing I knew how, noodles. Either plain egg noodles with butter and lots of salt, or ramon noodles. Oh, and I also used to mix chocolate chips and peanut butter, melt it in the microwave and eat it just like that. Pure heaven. I would still eat that if I got the chance, but I now hate plain noodles, and fast food.
Good thing I never had low self esteem. I look back at my senior pictures and wonder how I let myself get like that. But at the time, I thought they turned out great. I definitely thought I was hot stuff!
By the time I graduated high school I weighed about 180lbs at 5′2″. And things would only get worse in college…
To be continued tomorrow.
October 18, 2007
Ok, so the truth is these SP’s aren’t so pretty or witty and bright. Forgive me, I got a little sick of my face, so it’s all about fingers and toes for the last couple of days.
Day 41: I got published in a UK magazine. But, I’m not very happy about it. First off, when they originally contacted me, they said they were going to pay. Then, after I sent them all my images they told me that they were no longer going to be able to. Then, on top of all that, the image they printed came out really yellow. My print version of it, printed with a professional printing company, looks nothing like that…it looks a thousand times better. To see the image they used in the magazine, click here. Oh yeah, and this has nothing to do with the photography contest that I asked you guys to vote in a while back. I still won’t find out about that for a couple more weeks I think.
Day 42: My footsie with my favorite jogging/walking shoes. Hopefully they will be key in my weight loss for bikini season.
Day 43: Student loan repayment is getting me down. My advice to all, run, not walk, to the cheapest community college you can find. Later on down the road, you’ll be laughing when the rest of your big school friends are crying.
Day 44: Our system. We have a spare bedroom in which we keep all our clothes. Clean goes on the bed, dirty on the floor. Don’t ever call me unorganized.
One last thing, I’ll start writing on whatever wins the poll tomorrow!
October 17, 2007
Ok, after the last time I let you readers pick the story you wanted to hear, I decided I really liked having a topic all picked out for me before I wrote each night. So do it again…tell me what you want to read!














