Goodbye, slow-cooked pork

I had such lofty aspirations.

Next Sunday is my 30 and a half years old birthday. I said at 30 I would not spend another birthday this unhappy with my body, and now nearly six months has passed and I've done nothing. So I've decided to head back to old faithful, Weight Watchers. I've lost weight with them before and I can do it again. They now have monthly passes you can buy online, and I figure if I've paid for the month I'll go out of guilt. I hear guilt is a wonderful motivator.

Anyhoo, in preparation for next week's Week of Hungry Tummy, I'm trying to make some wiser food choices this week so it's not such a shock next week. I put a pork roast in the crock pot this weekend thinking I'd have pulled pork sandwiches this week for lunch. But it just tastes gross, like sloppy joes. I hate sloppy joes.

And speaking of commitments I declare I'm making and then don't follow through on, I just may be able to do that Take-A-Picture-Everyday thing now! We love our new phones and I'm just silly over the camera feature. Plus being able to blog by phone is just so cool. I'll work on getting more interesting subjects. Oh, and the pix look a little fuzzy on the blog, but if you click on them the bigger versions are a little clearer.

And for the Weekend Update... we didn't go to church yesterday. We need to do a little soul searching on that one, and I welcome your honest input. I guess I don't know how picky to be. How does one go about choosing a church? Anyway, we were expecting a storm yesterday morning (hooray!) so we decided to drive out to Sanibel and buy a Venus flytrap. Brad had jokingly suggested that we use them for our landscaping, and then Mom and I saw them at She Sells Seashells, a sweet shell shop on Sanibel, when Mom was here. So we drove out there and along the way the storm started to roll in. Funny thing-- now that it's sunny all the frickin time down here, I looooove gray days. The overcast, the rain, the clouds, just soothing and comforting for some reason. The drive was wonderful and we made a few stops to pick up some coconuts that we'll try to grow. We stopped for lunch and a flytrap and some chocolates at a place that was actually started in Newark, Ohio, in 1911 called Gouma's Chocolates where a lovely woman shared the story of the family and how she thinks Florida is filled with crazies.

We napped in the afternoon and then ran out to buy some pipe to divert rainwater coming out of the gutter from washing away our mulch. Then we came home and cleaned up the kitchen from my failed cooking attempts (two batches of very very flat bagels and one batch of crunchy brownies) and then watched Nowhere in Africa, the movie I netflixed in early March and never watched. Turned out to be sort of interesting, and the scenery was really fun to see. I particularly appreciated hearing the sounds of the tribal people singing-- really brought back the memories of our trip.

Today is another slow day at the office. Boss hasn't come in and probably won't, as really there isn't a big need for him to show up more than once a week. Things are slow and we have no new contracts in, which means my position as contracts administrator is pretty much, well, unfunded. We have twenty houses in various stages, with four of those just being started this week, so there are little things for me to do like request draws or write update letters to the owners. But really, I earn my keep about one day a week. I'm praying for something else to pop up, for my sake and for Boss's. I have to admit to a little worry about being cut loose and having to wait tables. I guess there are worse things. I also think about teaching, and every time I do without fail I have a nightmare about teaching that night.

Brad is at his client's place today, and we're not sure what the rest of the week will look like for him. We're praying for something to pop up for him as well. We think we'll be here for a while. As Ralph and Chris have said, with all the prayers going up on our behalf, if God wants to move us, he would be doing so.

Along those lines, we got an email from our Realtor last week suggesting we drop the price of the house. At current market rates the difference between our mortgage payoff and our selling price would be $622. It's awfully hard to cram closing costs and a Realtor commission into $622. If we sold at current market value (about $249,900) and paid all those costs, we'd be in debt about $18 grand. So the house will sit on the market and we will continue to pray. I can't say this is my favorite season of life, but I feel like I'm finally accepting that I will live in uncertainty for a while. I'm also mulling over the fruits of "suffering", although I don't think I can call what this is "suffering." When times are hard, we grow, we learn, we do some housecleaning and are reduced to the core of us.

I hope when I get to my core it weighs about what I weighed at our wedding.