corned beef hash

Holy shit. I'm a lard-ass. I mean really, how freaking hard can it be to keep my pie hole shut?!?! Ok, well, if I listen to that chum that was on Rachel Ray the other day, my brain is MAKING me overeat whenever I feel like it, but I doubt it. For example, I went downstairs to get breakfast in the cafeteria a little while ago. I had it all planned out in my noggin - yogurt or cottage cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of water. Or maybe some cream of wheat cereal with cinnamon, raisins, and a bit of brown sugar. Sounds good, right? Yeah, well my legs thought differently. I walked right past all those options and ordered a breakfast burrito with spinach, tomato, mushroom, hashbrowns, sausage, and egg, with a SCOOP of corned beef hash on the side. Yup. I ignored "healthy breakfast", blew right past "reasonable breakfast" and landed, ankle deep, in "seriously? Why not just inject that shit into your veins and skip the chewing?" And here's the really stupid part - as I'm typing this with my left hand, I'm shoveling the guts of my burrito into my face, because the salsa made the tortilla soggy, and I have a pure, unadulterated hate for soggy bread products. A girl has to draw the line somewhere, right? Yeah, well that's where my line is.

Ok, so enough bitching about food. Things are continuting to go quite shit-ily at Casa de Me. The Huz's company is probably going to close. And, because we're so amazing with money and all, we're going to try and buy it! Yep, hows THAT for logical? But, honestly, he's wanted this his whole life, and its not like we have much more to loose at this point, anyways. So, why not? I'll have to teach myself to be more supportive (stop laughing - miracles happen), and we'll have to somehow convince the SBA to give us a loan, but if anyone can pull it off, the Huz can. Speaking of the Huz, he truly is a glorious man. I was dead tired last night, and wanted to go to bed at 10. He wanted to stay up and watch tv for "a little while". He ended up staying up until 1 am ironing shirts and doing the dishes. Gem! He's a gem! Unfortunatley, this is not uncommon at our house. He does most of the picking up and "wifey" stuff, and I do most of the mess-making and baby-wrangling. I'm working on my self, and made a "lent" promise to give up laziness. So far its not working...I guess I'll have to actually WORK at it. boooo.

A funny thing.....

A friend at work sent me this....it made me laugh - which is not hard to do, but it hasn't happened in a while.

Women are Angels.
And when someone breaks our wings,
We simply continue to fly --
on a broomstick.
We are flexible like that.

Happy Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Week!

Hi tiny computer people! Happy CHD Awareness Week! I think its a crock that we don't get a whole month.....yet. But hey! A weeks better than nothing, right?!?!?! So, in honor of the cutest kid in the world (mine, of course) here are some fun facts about CHD:

• Approximately 1 in every 100 babies is born with a congenital heart defect. Each year approximately 40,000 babies are born in the United States with a congenital heart defect. More than 4,000 will not reach their first birthday, and thousands more die before they reach adulthood.
• There are more than 40 different types of congenital heart defects. Little is known about the cause of most of them. There is no known prevention or cure for any of them. More than 50% of all children born with a congenital heart defect will require at least one invasive surgery in their lifetime.
• In the United States, twice as many children die from congenital heart defects each year than from all forms of childhood cancer combined, yet funding for pediatric cancer research is five times higher than funding for CHD.
• One percent of all babies born will have a heart defect of some sort. That is four times the number of children diagnosed with a childhood cancer. And four times as many will die from their heart disease. Funding for pediatric research is painfully inadequate, even disproportionate, to the child population.

So, now you are wondering what you can do to help, right? :) Besides educating yourself and your child-bearing friends about the above statistics, why not....

• donate to a CHD organization
• donate an item to a CHD auction (ie: the one Camp del Corazon holds)
• register your customer loyalty cards (ie: Vons or Ralphs card) to donate Scrip to a CHD organization
• or, the most simple way you can help...SPREAD THE WORD!

-Encourage expecting parents to ask for additional information on heart defects during their (MANY) OB visits!

-Post Lyla's story, or the story of another heart baby in your life, on your Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, or other public forum accounts!

-Forward this information, or any CHD awareness email, to anyone and everyone in your address book.

Thank you for your support over the last year. We had no idea what we were in for this time last year, but I wouldn't trade our journey for ANYTHING.

Links to CHD organizations:

Children's Heart Foundation (www.childrensheartfoundation.org)

1in100 (www.1in100.org)

Camp del Corazon (www.campdelcorazon.com)

A vent...

Today is one of "those" days....it feels like things are never going to get better for us. The Huz is having a crappy day at work, and my sheer bliss at being busy at work on Wednesday and Thursday was short lived....it's back to the norm today. On top of that, thanks to our AWESOME Congress, we probably won't qualify to file for Chaper 7 bankruptcy. We have to wait to meet with our attorney tomorrow before we'll know for sure, but my ever-so-reliable gut instinct says we've yet again kidded ourselves into thinking something postive will happen, and it won't. This feels somehow lonely, even though I know there are people all over the country going through this exact same thing. How could we have done this to ourselves? To Lyla? Are we bad parents for getting ourselves into this mess? Bad people? I've always thought of us as "the good guys" - we both have college degrees, somewhat good jobs, we always carry a high amount of car insurance, we got married before starting our family, we saved and saved so we could have a baby, the list goes on and on. And yet, now that we're in trouble, all those efforts seem like nothing....like we wasted our time and energy. Blech. This sucks.

Full Bars - as in Full of SHIT bars!

(singing) "Sixteen tons, and what'dya get? Another day older and deeper in debt." Well, tiny computer-dwellers, its week "who the hell cares anymore" of my adventure to loose a zillion pounds. And, well, this week wasn't what I'd hoped. I tried these things called FullBars last week. The idea behind them is that they are basically puffed wheat cereal. You eat a bar, drink 8oz of water, and then have your meal 30mins later.....with the waterlogged cereal taking up lots of room in your stomach, so you feel fuller faster. Yeah. Right. I ate my FullBars like clockwork. 30 mins later, I'd have a SlimFast shake. I was looking forward to Sunday morning, when I was just sure the scale would errupt into a round of applause, and I would discover that I'd lost 12 or 13 pounds. NOPE. I told the Huz's sister on Friday about my awesome FullBar find. She asked me how much I'd lost. So, I decided to step on the scale a bit early (and yes, I know that you can get different weights at different times of the day - I was just looking for a ballpark number at the time). Well, holy shit. I was 9 pounds HEAVIER than I'd been at the beginning of the week! I don't care what kind of time difference there is between when you normally weigh your self and when you just decide to "take a chance" and see how much you've lost - 9 pounds is more than most newborns weigh!!!! So, I freaked out. The Huz told me to get a grip and try again in the morning. Well, that attempt resulted in a number that was even MORE frustrating, because I couldn't blame the time of day on it. Yep, I'd gained 7 pounds in week. I didn't even gain that much in a trimester when I was pregnant! So, screw you, FullBars! I was SO looking forward to seeing a smaller number this week, too! Booo.

On a totally unrelated note - why the HELL is the radiostation in my office playing Michael Jackson every other song today? Nope, I don't listen to KROQ anymore in the office. Too much beeping and screaming music. That, and I'm getting older, so now I listen to KOST - easy listening/soft rock. I've turned into my 11th grade English teacher. I knew it was coming, but I'm surprised it happened so soon. I'm only 29, for crying out loud! Anyways, back to MJ - just because his kids came on stage last night at the Grammy's and accepted an award for their "daddy" (sorry, but those kids don't have a black gene in their pool) now I have to listen to Earth Song and Man in the Mirror? A smart person would change the station, but it's not that easy to do when you have to make minute adjustments to the dial until some fuzz starts to sound like it might be a song....only to turn out to be some Spanish love ballad. I do live in LA after all.

Ugh. Being on a diet sucks. I'm just...well, I'm really.....ugh. I'm hungry. I'm hungry, and I'm looking up recipes on-line of things I can't make, because then I will eat them. Of course, even the thought of this makes me even hungrier. Hungrier? Did I spell that right? Oh well....I'm too hungry to care! I checked out what the cafeteria has to offer today....um....not much. Something called chicken noodle stew, some frighteningly adventurous Cantonese food (in a cafeteria? in LA???) and the normal, pizza-shaped, room temperature salt licks. So, again, I say to you BEING ON A DIET SUCKS! Although, I think I'm supposed to think of this as a "change in lifestyle" and not a diet. Whatever. I'm hungry.

I have my super exciting "getting to know your sewing machine" class tonight - and my sewing machine is still in the box. Granted, these last few days have been just a touch overwhelming, but I have no excuse for the 16 or so days before that, when I didn't have a care in the world, and had plenty of time to put this thing together. The Huz's suggestion was "well, when you get home tonight, put it together real quick before your class." Great. Thanks for that. I'd have never thought of that gem on my own! Here's the problem with that scenario. The class location is 15 mins away (at least). I get home at 5:30 after battling traffic for over an hour. I have to find something to eat before said class, because it lasts until dawn and we all know I'll be hungry before dawn. I'm supposed to put this machine together, which undoubtedly has 10,007 parts, in the 3 minutes I have remaining? Sure. It would have been great if the Fix-It Fairy had done it for me. But, the FIF was busy doing the dishes, getting a giant shot in his spine, and sleeping off the drugs from the aforementioned procedure yesterday. Soooo....this leaves me with a class I'm already too tired (and hungry!) to attend, a sewing machine I have no idea how to use, and a house to sell. Woe is me! Woooeeeeee!

On the upside, Lyla is morphing into a piranha. She's sprouted 2 teeth in the past 2 weeks, and we just saw another one beginning it's subterranean journey to the surface. Poor kid. She's taking it like a champ, screaming constantly and biting anyone and anything she can get her mitts on. The Huz and I are covered in drool, boogers, and tears (not sure if they are our own, or Lyla's.) And yet I'm still hungry. Hows that for a stomach of iron??

30

30 has become a very important number in my life. It's how old the Huz was when we found out we'd have to sell his truck, because "the Shop" couldn't pay for it anymore, and we couldn't assume the huge ass payments on our own (ok, seriously, WHY were the payments on a stock F150 over $500 a month? Anyone? Anyone?) 30 is the number of years we had on our fixed-APR home loan. And, heres the kicker, 30 is how old I'll be when we file for bankruptcy and short-sale our house. We've finally come to the realization (after being dragged to there kicking and biting, and having our faces shoved in it) that we are so upside-down on our house that we can't refinance, and we can no longer afford the payments. Ok, a little truth here....we've never been able to afford the payments. We thought we could. We thought "hey, we'll just pay the balloon payment for the first year or two, so we can start our savings and buy some fun new things, and then we'll start paying the full payment every month." That was a little over 2 years ago. We've been NOT buying "fun new things", and are still barely able to make our minimum mortgage payment every month.

On Sunday, we headed to our broker's office, somehow having convinced ourselves that we would be able to qualify for something, even if it only landed us in a condo or something. Well, you can start pointing and laughing now, because we were basically told that, not only would no one touch our loan with a ten-foot pole, but we were so far in debt that our only hope would be to declare bankruptcy, short-sale the house, and rent an apartment somewhere for a few years. I would have given anything to not have to watch the Huz's face as we heard that news. He feels like he's failed as a father and husband. I feel like a tool for not being able to convince him that we got into this mess to-ge-ther.

It's funny - I've hated our house from day zero. I hate the neighborhood, the neighbors (well, most of them at least), the gross park across the street.....EVERYTHING. And yet I cry every time I think of leaving the house. If we were just selling it, I'd be thrilled! But walking away from it? It's killing me. Lyla came home to this house! The Huz and I decorated her room together, and worried that the ceiling fan wasn't exactly centered (it wasn't....and I made him move it). She learned to crawl in the living room, and used to take naps on the floor with the dogs (supervised, of COURSE - gimme at least a LITTLE credit here, peeps!) Granted, ALL of my sentimentality with this house is linked to Lyla. The Huz and I had fun before she came along, but those memories weren't quite as sacred as the one's we've made since becoming a party of 3. And I know she'll never remember any of this. But still. It's crushing to realize that, no matter how much I hated something, it was MINE to hate, and now it's not going to be mine anymore. Which, of course, makes me love it. Why is that? It's like when some joke of a guy breaks up with you, and you suddenly forget why you hated him so much, and can only remember the good times you had together. And then you suddenly want him back more than anything else in the world. Although, if this is anything like that, if someone were to tell us "ok, well, you can keep the house afterall" we'd probably be stammering our way out the door, saying "oh, well, um, thanks and all, but, well, it's like this.....slam!" We'd be running down that ghetto black-asphalt driveway so fast people would think a new all-you-can-eat restaurant was opening up. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, right? Except the side of the fence that we're on....we couldn't afford to water our lawn anymore. So the grass on our side is dead. Brown, crispy, and dead.