So…it’s officially been a month without eating fast food, and I’m feeling pretty good. Now I’m not saying I haven’t had any massive cravings, because I have, but overall, it wasn’t that bad and the month practically flew by! However, I still feel like a fatty.

The past few weeks I’ve been exercising more, and doing more cardio, and I haven’t really seen any results at all – scale-wise…so I was getting frustrated.

But then, out of nowhere, last week I woke up and was taking the dog out before work and I noticed a package at my front door. When I opened it, it was a book that my Mom had ordered for me from Amazon. It’s a book called ‘The Spark’ by Chris Downie, and it’s all about a 28 day program designed to jumpstart weight loss and inspire changes in one’s life. Needless to say, I read the whole book in roughly a day, and subsequently I’ve been following the Sparkpeople way of life since last Friday.

It’s a pretty cool website, and the program’s based on eating healthier foods, drinking 8 glasses of water a day, setting short and long-term goals for yourself and tracking your calories eaten and burned each day through the site. I like that the program places a lot of emphasis on achieving keeping yourself on a “spark” where you continually achieve small goals you set for yourself (such as drinking enough water each day, exercising for at least 10 minutes a day, etc.)

Hopefully I’ll be able to stick to this and actually see some results this time. I’ll go ahead and note that at the time I started this weight loss journey I weighed around 130 lbs and I felt like I was well on my way to getting back to the weight I was a few years ago, 165lbs. So let’s just hope that this time will be different and I’ll be able to stick to the program in time for bathing suit weather!

I ordered some cheap toy lens attachments from Hong Kong for my camera on my Droid and they finally arrived today! This is from experimenting with the ’6 frame’ lens. It’s really a picture of a framed drawing I did in college.

Get ready for some more experiments though, because I now have 12 different lenses for the Droid! I’m excited!

The past few days have been really great. I was able to have a pretty awesome photo shoot at work with some co-workers on Sunday night, then I was able to have Monday and Tuesday off so I went up to Greensboro and hung out with some friends from home, which was nice, and I did Long Distance laundry for the last time because later in the evening I went down to Charlotte and finally got the washing machine that Dad’s been telling me he was going to give me for the past 2 months!

Hooray! no more “Long Distance Laundry” aka Going over 50 miles to one of my parent’s houses to do laundry for free because I don’t have any appliances of my own and I’m too cheap to go to a laundromat!
So overall, I think today was a win.

Then the night got even better when I was able to get my Tuesday night TV fix with LOST and Glee, both of which had great plotlines this week!

Hopefully the water supply situation will be fixed this week, because last week the Hickory government, along with a few more close cities and towns, discovered that there was a weird algae growth in the drinking water supply, so they had to do a massive water treatment (which basically meant they just put a crap-ton of carbon in the water supply) a few days ago, and ever since then the water has both tasted and smelled like crap. And I even bought a Brita to try to combat it, but sadly it was no use…my showers, dishwasher, toilet and normal tap water still smell funky. But hey, it could always be worse, I could be living in Boston right now during the 2010 “Aquapacolypse”.

Anyway, I need to sleep but I’m jazzed for no reason whatsoever…lame. I’ve got work in less than 7 hours and I need my beauty sleep so that I can wake up super early and take another funky smelling shower. Wish me luck!

So today wasn’t as busy at work as I wanted it to be, but the funniest part of the day was when I was finishing up the confirmation calls and as I got to the last call I dailed the number and ended up hearing one of the oddest voicemails I’ve ever heard.

Basically, it started out as a normal voicemail with the whole “I can’t get to the phone right now…” then it went on to this really long speech about Jesus & how he died on the cross so that we could have eternal life…then the kicker was when it said “If you don’t know about Jesus Christ, ask me about him when I call you back.”

It then went on to close with the inevitable “have a blessed day!”

Of course. The hilarity factor is hard to translate if you haven’t heard it, but just take my word for it, it was pretty funny.

Basically it discusses an article by James Sturm, a writer at Slate Magazine (www.slate.com) about his attempt at going 4 months without using the internet. Personally, I’ve been struggling with some of the same exact questions about my life (and the internet’s role in it) lately, and I can relate to the author describing how when he’s not using a computer he’s thinking of ways he can get back to using the computer.

“The question I’ve been wrestling with lately is whether it’s all going by so fast because that’s just the reality of middle age or because of the way I’ve been living my life. Specifically, I’ve started to wonder whether that feeling might be connected to all the time I spend online. Too often I sit down to dash off a quick e-mail and before I know it an hour or more has gone by.”    – James Sturm (from his article ‘I’m Quitting the Internet’: http://www.slate.com/id/2249562/entry/2249563/ )

Thinking back, it’s really kind of crazy how internet/social media obsessed my generation has become. I mean, there’s people I know (myself included on occasion) who can’t go 5 minutes without checking their cell phone to see if they’ve gotten a new email or text message. And those same people often end up replying to those emails and text messages immediately after they see them in their inboxes. If you think back to the time before myspace, facebook, twitter and all of the other social media outlets, to a time when we actually got out of our houses and interacted with each other…it’s just mind blowing how much society has changed in the past 15 years. When I think about how often I check my email, and my cell phone, and all of the various social media networks I belong to, it kind of makes me sad. I really do feel like I shouldn’t have to check my email so often, or let checking my email turn into an excuse to spend hours on the internet wasting time at various websites (I’m looking at you, youtube.)

I went to Ollie’s Bargain Outlet yesterday, which was an adventure within itself, but while I was there I found the book “Upgrade your Life” by Gina Trapani, the founding editor at Lifehacker.com. I started reading it last night and I’m hooked. The book itself is fantastic, it’s a collection of tips and tricks to increase productivity and to in essence, upgrade your life. The first thing the book mentions is taking control over your email inbox. It seems that more often than not, we are becoming slaves to our inboxes, reacting everytime we get a notification of receiving a new email, then immediately dropping everything we’re doing to respond to the email, which then can usually lead to other internet based distractions…which we all know leads to the internet becoming a huge source of time suckage in our lives. The book describes easy ways to empty and sort your inbox so that you’re not a slave to it, and it teaches some really awesome ways to manage your time and dedicate only certain amounts of time to email responses and how to effectively shorten your email responses without omitting important information. All in all, the book is really informative and I’m looking forward to putting some of these “Hacks” to use!

Basically, since the new year everything has been a blur. On my birthday, I was offered a job as a sales associate & photographer for a company called Portrait Innovations. So that was an exciting birthday present, and I accepted the job and proceeded to move from Greensboro to Hickory, NC to start work at a new studio opening there.

It wouldn’t be my life if there wasn’t some sort of drama, so of course the first day of my job training in Charlotte, NC, I had a grand mal seizure…first one ever.

But anyway, I turned out okay, and haven’t had one since, *fingers crossed!

So I just got a Motorola Droid a few days ago, and it’s my first smartphone so I’m planning on trying to keep up with the blog better now that I’ve got the internet literally at my fingertips! So I’ll be trying to update the blog every day or so with the newest “Sitcom Moment” in my life as it occurs!

I think there's a slight resemblence...maybe.

So yeah, that’s about it. Thanksgiving was everything you could expect it to be with my family; it included ham in a bag, wine in a box, and by the end of the night we were fishing for wine corks and my cousin was yelling at her father to keep his teeth in his head. All in all, it was a pretty awesome Thanksgiving.

Anyway, I’m working on a complete and total redesign of my website. I’m talking top-to-bottom overhaul. I’m planning on doing most of the design part within the next day or so, then I’ll probably spend next week tweeking the code and adding special SEO elements and deciding whether I should continue to use my hosting service or if I should switch.

I’ll try my best to keep the blog updated with the progress of the site. Hopefully something great will come of it!

Anyway, before I post any of the pictures from this weekend, I’ll fill you in on some of the details of what’s been happening in my life for the past week or so.

Basically I’m in the same position as always, I’m still actively job searching and hoping that sometime soon I’ll find something. Last weekend I went down to Savannah to see Kayla’s performance in the SCAD mainstage production of “A New Brain”. Needless to say, it was fantastic. Everything from the musical direction to the performances to the production design was perfect! Kudos to the SCAD performing arts majors who dedicated so much time and effort to make the production as great as it was!

I got back from Savannah on Sunday, and I then proceeded to wrack my brain to try to figure out if I should actually go to grad school or not…still haven’t figured that one out. Since then I’ve picked back up on the job hunt and I’ve decided to maybe try to get a job as a bartender or waitress. I’m also going to try to volunteer as an editor for thedailysource.org – a daily news website. So we’ll see if they want me to help.

I shall keep you updated!