Preparing for winter

Dave lived in Minnesota for 60 years and I did so for 45 years. You’d think we’d know how to do this, wouldn’t you?

It’s amazing to me how much we managed to forget once we got out of here. And how much stuff we are having to acquire again. First was a snow brush for the car. Then Dave bought boots. We had to figure out how to wear layers all over again.

We probably should buy winter coats but we are resisting doing that. Instead we’ve settled for layering our lightweight jackets over fleece jackets. Which was a problem the other day when I wore a stretchy polyester suit since my fleece refused to slide over that. I couldn’t change clothes because that’s the only dressy thing I own and we were headed to a memorial gathering. I settled for wearing my full length raincoat and letting Dave drop me and pick me up right at the door. I don’t know if that would have been OK if we’d had an accident along the way so had to sit in the car without heat.

Maybe we need to buy some sleeping bags to put in the car for emergencies? We never carried those when we lived here but then we actually wore winter coats. And we did carry insulated boots in the car. Do we need to buy more of those, too?

How do you survive winter? How do WE survive winter?

TTYL,

Linda

ps. Another week with another Weight Watchers award. This one for losing 25 pounds. I’m on a roll here, folks, instead of BEING a roll here.

Weight Watchers 2012

As many of you know “New. Improved.” are not some of my favorite words. I dislike it when someone takes something I regularly use and makes something different of it. So I was a little concerned when Weight Watchers announced they were “improving” their Points Plus system.

So far, it has not been as bad as I feared. The main thing they changed in week one of this rollout is the number of points I’m supposed to use when deciding what to eat. My daily points goal dropped from 29 to 27. In explanation of this the leader of this week’s meeting told us that when WW started the Points Plus system they did they best they could to determine the right number of points for most people. They also debuted eTools which lets people track their food and weight on-line.

What never occurred to me is that they are watching on-line entries to see what people are doing with the program. That gives them information as to how people’s bodies are responding to what level of points. Never mind that some of us don’t always enter the zero points food we eat. Their analysis led them to discover that many of us can eat less. In fact. we can eat as little as 26 points and still stay healthy as long as we choose from a variety of foods. 29 points is no longer the lowest they encourage you to go. So they dropped their recommendations for many of us.

The result of being assigned 27 points is I lost 2.4 pounds in one week. If you’ve been reading this blog for long you know that when I lose more than 2 pounds a week for two weeks in a row they scold me for loosing too fast.

But, another feature of this new program is you can go into eTools and change your points target.

So I boosted mine back up to 29 points. Yes, I want to lose my excess weight. But I want to do it at a healthful rate. 29 points works for me. I don’t need “New. Improved.”

TTYL,

Linda

ps. I also won an award at the meeting for having lost 10% of my starting weight. That feels good.

Xfinity

“Xfinity”  That’s what it said on the side of the truck.

Hmmm. Infinity means forever. Affinity means a natural liking. So does Xfinity mean never liking?

When I asked Dave he said, “Yes.”

It seems Xfinity is part of Comcast, our local cable TV provider. When we moved into the apartment and our router started flaking out  Dave checked out Comcast since we had one of their cable modems before going on the road. After reading about them he decided to get a DSL modem from the local phone company instead.

Enough said?

TTYL,

Linda

Not Going

“Oh, the weather outside is

 

But the

is so delightful.

And since we’ve no place to go…”

Why do we have no place to go? Because we found

.

So all week long we add things to our on-line grocery list from whichever internet enabled device happens to be the most handy at the moment.

Then on Monday we close it out and on Tuesday someone not us goes and picks out all our groceries and they show up at our apartment door that afternoon where the driver unloads his bins right into our kitchen.

All this for $5 each time. Which they are refunding every trip for the first 90 days.

I’m loving it.

Except! The image I gave Dave of having to push a grocery cart through the snow and slush every week has ceased to be a threat so I may have a harder time persuading him he doesn’t really want to stay here forever. Oops!

TTYL,

Linda

ps. Yes, that fireplace is in our living room.