I Am Grateful

Today was my second visit to TOPS, and I officially joined for a year (to start). I went last Thursday for the first time, and got weighed in. Then this week another weigh in (they weigh every week), and I don't know how I did it, but I lost 1 1/4 pounds in that one week. A good start, for sure. I admit I ate a fair bit of chocolate cake with icing, ate a couple small Naniamo Bars, Bread Pudding with sauce and ice cream, Chinese food. Not the average weight loss diet. However, I also only drank 1 small (591ml) bottle of Coke in that week, and I've been using less sugar in my tea. So, good and bad.

After the TOPS meeting, everyone went for lunch. I went to the grocery store and got some fruit, ate a banana, then went and joined the rest of them and just drank tea. Later in the day I bought some liquid Stevia, a natural sweetener. I'm not wild about the taste of it, and don't feel that it's such a great sweetener, though many swear by it, and since I bought the stuff I'm going to work at getting used to it. I hope I can learn to enjoy my tea with it, or totally without sugar... eventually.

Came home and did some computer work for The Centre, part of my volunteer work. I did up the Sunday Programs and the Membership List in 2 different formats. I've found someone who will take over part of doing the Programs. I will still do the computer work and printing them off, and she will cut and assemble them. This is a good thing. I hope to eventually get her printing them too, then I'll just have to do them on my computer and email them to The Centre for her. In the meantime, I am delighted to have part of it given to another person. I have a lot on my plate and am happy to let something go, and to give someone else the opportunity to give of their time.

This evening I went to town and did some shopping. I had a gift card for Future Shop, it had $159.17 on it still, and is gone now, lol. I bought an external hard drive to put my pictures and documents onto as safe storage. You never know when something could happen. I've in the past lost a lot when computers crash. I had to pay just over $20 on top of the gift card, and I 1 terabyte (TB) of storage and a 5 year limited warranty. A TB is 1 Trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. I can't imagine ever filling it up, but the 500 GB external hard drive was only $30 less and had a 2 year warranty, so I figured for $3o difference, and considering I had most of the money on that card, I may as well go big or stay home.

After Future Shop I went next door to the pet store, played with a parrot, looked at other critters including an albino Cockatiel (very rare), then got the Cat Nip spray I went there for. Mewsic keeps scratching things, yet I've never seen her scratch her scratch post, though she totally loves it and usually can be found curled up in the top part of it. She's even gotten to where she doesn't often run from Reba when she gets too close, she just hisses, spits, and swats at poor innocent Reba, with claws out of course. Nasty cat.

Then, after picking up the bottle of Stevia liquid, I went and picked up Lorraine to go to the Centre. I printed out the program and made sure she knew how I like it put together. She stayed at The Centre for her Science Of Mind class, and I went to my Camera Club meeting. It was a very good, informative evening, though I sure was glad to get home. I was in so much pain I just couldn't take much more. As soon as I got home I went and laid down for over an hour before I could force myself to get up and come out to the computer and to feed animals before I go to bed for the night.

I think I'll feed them now, then I can take this laptop to bed with me and post a bit more. I want to do some research on growing cat nip or cat mint, research the difference between them, and also growing mint. I love fresh mint tea, especially chocolate mint, and the really good stuff is very expensive. I've grown some before and really enjoyed the tea from my home grown chocolate mint, but the plants died. I think maybe I didn't give them enough water in the real hot part of the summer when I was too hot to function properly. I'm much better in cool weather and melt in the heat.

I am grateful for this day
I am grateful that I lost some weight
I am grateful for the 1TB external hard drive
I am grateful for the things I learned tonight about White Light and using Photoshop & GIMP
I am grateful for Lorraine taking over the assembly of the Sunday Programs
I am grateful for my laptop
I am grateful for my high speed wireless internet connection
I am grateful for my bed