Anyone still out there?

Oh, HI!

Forgive me blogger, it's been over 3 months since my last post. To be honest, I've been entertaining the idea of just closing this here blog down lately. Everytime I thought of posting, nothing would come to mind. You know how I said before I needed that first bit of inspiration? well...it finally came.

Today's inspiration to blog comes from Franklin and the following quote from The Panopticon (Thanks Franklin!):

You know how farmers rotate crops to keep the soil fertile? I have to do that occasionally with my creative focus to keep my brain from turning into a dustbowl. Put down the needles, pick up the camera. Put down the camera, pick up the pencil. Put down the pencil, pick up tomatoes.*

It's not like there's been a whole lot to write about though. Things over here on my end just seem, well, on auto-pilot lately. Work has settled into a nice easy pace these past couple of months, while we ramp up for another big project. With the exception of a couple of lovely reunions with my Boston knit girls, the summer's been pretty tame. Is it just New England, or is this summer taking forEVER to begin? If it's not cold, it's raining. Or both. Here we are more than halfway through June and I'm pretty sure it's rained every 3 out of 4 June days. On the fourth day though, here's what it looked like at our house:



If only it could look like that every weekend. But this week, we'll let's just say it doesn't feel like summer at all when you're still using your car seat warmer on the way to the gym in the morning.

So right, Franklin. I've been doing a little rotating myself lately. What with the whole lose-weight, eat-healthy, go-to-the-gym-daily thing that's been occupying my mind for the last 6 months, it probably goes without saying that I've been thinking about food quite a bit. These past six months, knitting has taken the Way Back seat (did you every use that phrase to identify the part of a station wagon that is behind the back seat? We did.), to collecting and trying out new recipes. Here are a few of my favorites - not all are super healthy, but what can you do when you come across a such gems other than just accept and incorporate? I do love my Paula Deen.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/chunky-ginger-mango-barbecue-sauce-with-mixed-grill-recipe/index.html

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/israeli-couscous-with-apples-cranberries-and-herbs-recipe/index.html

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/broccoli-salad-recipe/index.html

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/posole-mexican-lasagna-recipe/index.html

On the toddler front, I am Very Pleased to announce that I have one fully potty-trained child. Miss Scarlet has fancy new mermaid underwear which she's been wearing proudly and without incident all week. One down, one to go. Blu and Scarlet's language development has blown up these past few months. Blu actually starts sentences with "I think," - which cracks me up. While I still try very hard to stick to the 7 pm -ish bed time, the truth is that they don't go to sleep until 9 or later. They just play in their rooms and have little parties amongst themselves. It's pretty awesome, if you don't mind the noise.

I had every intention of buying a fancy new SLR camera this summer, but instead, we are renovating our kitchen. Move over SLR. Enter new stainless steel Samsung Fridge which gets delivered here in less than 24 hours. SWEET. Other plans? Doors are going to be knocked down and boarded up. New cabinets, counters. New bathroom to replace the current toilet-in-the-pantry that we have now. The salvaged dishwasher that has been sitting in our basement for two years will be brought back to life. It's gonna be HUGE. There will be pictures - though sadly, not on an SLR. I may even make some reno blog posts to document the whole thing - you know, in the name of rotating my creative focus. Stay tuned.

simmer

2009 is the year of self improvement here at chez bella blu. In December, what should have been a perfectly sexy moment between my husband and I (him snapping a phone photo of me nearly naked) turned out instead to prompt me to join a gym. I had gained about 20 lbs since our wedding day and man, I used to look a lot better naked. So join a gym we did. I've joined gyms before, but I have never been a cardio girl - more of a yoga and circuit type. However, I've never joined a gym with the idea of losing weight before - so for the past 2 months, I've been huffing and puffing on the cardio machines almost every morning at 6 AM, and I'm happy to tell you that I have lost 10 lbs so far. In another month or so, I'll have Dean take that picture again.

There's been a big shift if my eating habits as well. I'm paying attention to calories for the first time in my life. Had you told my 18-28 year old self I'd be doing this, I would have laughed my ass off and maybe even turned my nose up a bit. But something else happened recently that has stitched the lips of my 18-28 year old self. I turned 35 this week and realized that I'm just like everyone else that gets older. In my head, I am on a new planet now, with new rules. Not sure what those rules are, but I am allowing myself the flexibility to break all my old rules.

I don't usually throw birthday parties for myself, not liking that kind of attention; but I felt 35 warranted some celebration. I spent the week working out a little more and eating a little less in anticipation of the spread: a 10 lb pork loin, sweet potatoes and an Oreo Mudslide Cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. And now that I think about these things, I looked up the caloric value of a piece of said cheesecake: 1,050 baby. I almost managed to eat an entire slice. :)

There was an unexpected perk of a birthday party - a gift card to my LYS. I've been stalled on the knitting front for a little while, being hugely disappointed that my last project ended up being a size too big. The gift card is going towards a sweater's worth of Noro. It's been too long since I've knitted with Noro. I'll be headed there today after the 10 inches of snow is done falling (I'm taking a snow day to stay home with Dean and the kiddos, but will take advantage of a little time to myself).

Another birthday looms large - Blu and Scarlet turn 3 next month. They're little people now, and I can't really call them babies anymore. Within months, they'll be out of diapers and sleeping in beds and that is.just.nuts. If you haven't seen it yet on fb or flickr - Blu's most recent obsession is Popping. He does this constantly, calling it his "robot dance."



Here is a video of his inspiration. It's absolutely amazing, go watch it now.

Darths Bella and Blu

Today is not really our Christmas

Instead of a nice quiet Christmas Eve at home, we were in the ER. Instead of a Christmas morning of Dean giving out toys to our kids, he gave his appendix to a doctor.

Children put a whole new spin on being sick and needing to get help quickly. As with many things, kids, just by sheer virtue of existing, make the issue more about them. Gone are the days were you can just hop in the car and drive to the ER and get yourself taken care of. Here are the days where you have to consider timing, and child care, and well, stuff. Because of kids, I made Dean call our nurse hotline thingee at 6 instead of 7 (though His Manliness really wanted to wait until 7 - which is bedtime). Because of kids, we couldn't just go straight to the ER, but rather first had to call the MIL, ask to have them stay the night with her, pack their shit up, take them there, put them to bed and THEN go to the ER. Appendicitis is a strange thing - because he wasn't in enough pain for us to really need to skip those steps and just call an ambulance, but you never know when the little bugger might rupture.

Reason #1 why we moved here plays out in yet another way - family there when you need them.

So we're going to have Christmas on Saturday instead. Thankfully, our kids have no idea what today is or what it really brings as far as loot, so they'll never know the difference.

Halloween pics are in!

I'm pretty sure this is the last year that I can pull this kind of costume off.



My love handles are skillfully hidden in this shot, but man, do I need to get back to the gym.

And for toddlers, we had PIRATES.




Arrgh.

A New Chapter

So GUESS what I get to do tomorrow?

I am paying.off.my.student.loans. FOR REALZ.

na na na na
na na na na
hey hey hey
GOODBYE.

10 years ago when I started my monthly payments, my student loan debt made my eyes cross. The balance I had accumulated was almost unfathomable to me. I couldn't even picture what my life would be like without a student loan debt looming over my head. The pay off date was so far in the future that I pretty much tricked myself into thinking that I'd have this payment forever. And it was a significant enough payment to feel a punch each month - in a way that was a constant reminder to me that I was not, in fact, using my degree in any lucrative way. For a while (before kids, ahem) I actually made a few double payments to try to get ahead, then that went out the window when I deferred my loan when I was jobless and between homes. I really never thought I'd see this day. In the past 10 years I have come to terms with the fact that I will never do what my education prepared me for (psychology), but I can honestly say that I do use some practical lessons from those studies in my job today and I continue to feel that it was all worth it. The fact that my student loan has been replaced with credit card debt and a mortgage doesn't at all overshadow the sense of pride and accomplishment I'm feeling right now. HUZZAH!

And to just add a knitting touch to that sense of accomplishment - A FINISHED project! It's a super easy drop stitch scarf pattern (details on ravelry) that I found while searching for something to do with my Briar Rose yarn from Rhinebeck of last year. It was originally purchased for a Clapotis, but then, it didn't quite make it.


and here's a close up for ya:


It has the loveliest oil on water feeling to it - mostly blue, but with a shimmery yellow halo to it. It.Is.Awesome. I couldn't love it more.

You might remember that I was working on Juno a while back...


and well, I'm about 85% complete and seem to have run out of yarn. It's languishing in my closetin it's current almost completed state because I'm fairly sure I can get another skein close to the same color, but I'm not in any huge rush. It's possible that it will stay there forever.

And here's some gratuitous baby stuff for those of you who might be wanting it (Hi Theresa! I promised I'd deliver!) -

These are toddlers.



These are toddlers on hatebreed.

Any questions? Blame my brother in law. His music. His idea.

The wee demons are still running me ragged, and now challenging me on a verbal level too. I can't believe I can have conversations with them now (nothing huge, but definite back and forth dialogue). Scarlet is obsessed with boo boo remedies, she is constantly asking for ice or band-aids. She insists on wearing pink almost every day. In fact, I'm completely amazed at how gender-stereotypical their likes are. She gravitates to dolls, Blu to trains and cars. I had no hand in this. I gave them each the same toys (and dolls were never even in my house...until we were in the toy aisle at the drug store killing time and she went straight for the baby doll and started feeding it its bottle). She is also the caretaker, asking if people are ok and petting them in comfort if something has gone wrong. Blu is much more rambunctious - the other day I picked him up from day care and he was diving over a smallish plastic car thing (it was about as high as his waist). Diving over the top, head first, into the ground. Repeatedly. And loving it! (He never actually hit his head, but it sure did look like that was what he was aiming for.)

God help me.

Couldn't resist

Wendy asked us to post humorous pictures of our ballroom dresses. I present Junior Prom, 1991:



I drove. There was dinner at a greasy burrito joint in downtown Atlanta that didn't even have table service - I remember the guy behind the counter said everyone that came in there should dress as we did (miss you, Fridolerjos). And lastly, late night games of pool afterwards.

Good times.

Other ways of being a bad blogger

To wit,

You have not really been reading blogs closely for a while - just barely scanning pictures - and you don't notice when people you used to read avidly have not posted in months...either because they have not posted or because they moved and you didn't catch the post where they mentioned it.

I am a bad blogger - in every way. :(

But then you actually stop to read a post, just an everyday normal post, and are reminded that even everyday normal posts are Totally Awesome. And you get inspired to write even if there is nothing to say. (To wit, I'm halfway through a second sock...I'm working my ass off at work to the point that I have decided that an afternoon cup of coffee might be necessary for me to function once I get home. Eh. Whatever.)

I don't know how you all typically come up with your posts, but for me, it all starts with one sentence. Sure, I see great ideas out there and memes that I could hop on the train of that could give me a starting point and some structure, but if that one special sentence isn't there, there is no post (actually, there's often nothing special about the sentence...sometimes it doesn't even survive the draft). The sentences come out of nowhere...and then I form a post around them. Lately those sentences are few and far between, drowned out by the squeaky voice of Elmo and the theme song to Sesame Street. Today's post-inspiring sentence credit goes to Juno...and it's special because it wasn't even my sentence..it was her sentence that started my post:

I was having a little bit of an obsessive brood this weekend about some topic whose grooves are well worn in my head - I'm not trying to be deliberately oblique or anything, or maybe I am.

If Juno is not in your life, she should be. Juno is majestic and beautiful and has the most amazingly positive way of psychoanalyzing things. Juno is the therapist I wish I could have been back in my I'm-going-to-be-a-psychologist days. Much as I love reading her blog, it has gone by the wayside along with almost all other blogs I have on my blogroll...not because I don't love her, of course, but because I got nuthin' left at the end of the day, not even to read.

Note to self - maybe two cups of coffee in the afternoon...just to see.

Anyway, a special thank you to my Queen of the gods. Your post today reminded me what I love about blogs and how cool it is when you can hear the person speaking as if she is across the table...and how much more that makes you miss her.

To you I offer the very rare family photo - only slightly out of focus:

Peace Out

I was a little irritated with myself after the previous two posts (as you probably were too) - too much complaining, not enough doing. So last week on the Friday afternoon I had off, I finished my sweater (Peace, by Kim Hargreaves) while sipping a lovely iced latte on a front porch. Well, almost finished...there should be buttons and button loops here, but I'm thinking I only one want button, just at the base of the v-neck. Jury's still out on that one.



Here's the non-modeled, highly edited version to show the pretty stitches:



Specs can be found on my project page on ravelry...(I'm under bella blu mama) - I tried to link but it didn't work. Who knows how to do that?

But knitting wasn't on the list of neglected activities...so Saturday, I baked some pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, complete with freshly grated nutmeg (who knew nutmeg looked so cool on the inside?) and whipped out the camera for some picture and video taking.



Here's a little snapshot of what my neighbor calls a Horton Hears A Hoo plant:



And here's one of the rainbow we had that night:



So yeah. Sick of complaining. It's summer time, the day is long. The vegetable and herb gardens are springing to life (no pictures on them just yet...but wait and see).

Relativity

Maryse's ways of wasting time, listed here, are many the things I said I used to do in the post below.

Coincidence?

The thing is - I used to have quite a lot of time to "waste." Three years ago I worked a forty hour work week, approximately 10 of which was actual work. When I say I barely did anything - I mean it was downright painful how little I did. Painful like so bored I wanted to poke my eyes out. Not because I didn't do my work, but because there wasn't work for me to do. It was out of that desperation that I began reading knitting blogs and writing my own. And on the home front, of course, there were no babies. There was a LOT of time to do things - time to spare. Time to waste.

Now, as you all know, I have no time. No time to spare at work or at home, no time to complete all my work by the deadlines, no time to clean my house, nothing. Those things I listed below - that used to be ways of wasting time, are now the things that I have to fight for, to slip in here and there - wherever I can. How strange to go from one extreme to the other in all areas of my life. Hello? Balance please??

Tomorrow at work we are packing up and moving to a different building - the move starts at 1, which means a free half day for those of us that are relocating. Can't work when all of our stuff is in transit, so we get to go home.

An afternoon to myself! What to choose from the list below...

Things I Used To Do

(in no specific order)

• Spin yarn
  
• Browse pictures on Flickr
• Read magazines
  
• Make phone calls
• Bake
• Take pictures
• Read blogs
• Take long bubble baths
  
• Think about something long enough to formulate a blog post

One day I'll pick all of these things up again. Right?

The day has finally come

The day after I moved into our house last summer, my next door neighbor told me she'd seen a bear in my yard just the day before. I kinda flipped out...

It's been almost a year exactly, and lookie who stopped by today to snag my left over lunch.



I really need a garbage disposal.

I guess I won't be going on a lot of walks with the wee beasties this weekend. Methinks we'll go to the park instead.

San Fran baby

In two days, I will be on a plane to San Francisco for my first real vacation in five years...my first vacation since my honeymoon...since getting pregnant and having kids and becoming a frantic, exhausted working away from home mom. One whole week with no kids, just husband.

So, if you've been and have a favorite place to visit - I need suggestions! I need direction. Favorite yarn stores, favorite restaurants, favorite scenic spots...I need it all. If I don't have a plan, I may very well stay in bed all day with Dean and while that is COMPLETELY worthwhile, I don't see why we should travel across the country to do it. OK, maybe we'll do it one day. But that leaves 5 days left to fill.

Whaddaya got for me??

Happy Birthday, Babies

Or not so much babies anymore...



Two years old today. Tearing around the house, all mischief and giggles. Miss Scarlet is picking up new words every day, though not so much with the sentences. She can however mimic my exuberant "hi guys" greeting to her and Blu, and even the come hitherish "hey baby" greeting to Dean with perfection. Blu is still pretty much in babble zone. I'd say he has about 10-12 words and the only one that is properly enunciated is "hat." We're plugging along though. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little heartbroken when I hear of other newly two year olds talking in sentences already (yes you, Miss Nica) - but I'm not so terribly worried that it keeps me up at night. The truth is, I like the babble. It's freakin' adorable. Once it goes, it's gone forever, and with it a certain amount of cuteness. So I'm ok with it. Really.

I haven't been reading any What To Expect books for toddlers lately, so I have to say I'm a little in the dark on where they are developmentally other than speech. Checkup is on Monday though, so I'll hear if there's anything more to worry about. We haven't really started potty training, but there is a potty that floats around the house and they know what it is and that pants go down before you sit on it. No pressure. They do tell me when they've pooped though (for Blu, that's "poot"), which cracks me up every time.

We do have a bit of a weight problem, and this one does keep me up at night. Miss Scarlet is barely over twenty pounds. Blu is at 24. It's not for lack of feeding them or even feeding them good fats. There have been a lot of ear infections lately and a lot of teething and that makes for not so much eating. My little peanuts. There are one year olds out there bigger than you.



We've started playing around with baby yoga - which just amazes me. A friend was over and out of the blue started asking them to do yoga poses with her and they DID. Instantly. With precision. Blu's downward dog is perfect - down to the fact that his feet are flat on the ground. I couldn't ever do that - even after two years of yoga. Crazy.

Happy Birthday Babies. You're awesome.

The balance swings again

Never in my whole life have I had a job that keeps me awake at night.

Wait - that's not exactly true.

I used to seethe with hate and anger during my first job out of grad school cuz I hated my boss so much. But it wasn't the job, it was THE MAN.

And back in college I worked at a coffee shop in NYC for the summer, and I used to wake in the middle of the night trying to sell people iced tea.

But now is different. Now my mind races as I try to relax into sleep, as it itemizes all of the things I need to do and searches for brilliant new ideas and plans of attack. There's a lot of work at my job, my colleagues are stressed to the max and thinking of quitting. I'm somehow staying afloat and there is talk of a promotion...but it's WEIRD. And kind of scary.

Weird because I used to use work time to pay bills and blog and chat with friends and now I use work time to work. In fact, I even use home time to work. Now when I come home, that small bit of time between my arrival and the babies' bedtime is my downtime, busy though it is. It's the time I don't think about work and can be silly and have fun. It's short, this time, but it completely resets me (that is, until I try to go to sleep and my mind races again).

When did I become this person that cares about work? It all has to do with responsibility - work gave me responsibility and credibility and now people come to me to ask questions and get answers and I spend my whole day responding to emails and being in meetings and never actually doing the work I'm supposed to do.

I'm complaining, I know. It's just all very new to me and I'm still marvelling at it. I'm marvelling at how it changes my perspective on things and how it re-prioritizes things for me.

It's cool that I no longer have a job that bores me to tears. I have a job that challenges me. Sure, it's not all that glamorous or even interesting - but it makes me think and keeps me on my toes. I can get my kicks elsewhere, right? Like with hair. I have new hair and it's curly and bright and it makes me happy.



I do need to find a way to work knitting back into my life. The collar of Juno is complicated enough that I never have the mental energy to work on it; so need to start a new mindless project. I fear Juno won't be ready to wear this winter at all. Ah well. This too shall pass....right??

Bad blogger

These days I haven't been such a good blogger. The real reason is that I'm busy at work - for probably the first time ever - and work is where I used to do my blogging. Now I'm working through lunch even and well, once I get home, there are a million other things to do. Knitting and spinning have been few and far between - though I expect in a week or two I may have some finished projects to show off.

Oddly enough, my belly problems have been few and far between despite them usually being prevalent enough to warrant scope-y investigation. It must be like when you take your car to the mechanic and as soon as you get there, the car stops doing what it was doing that made you go there in the first place. I take my insides to the GI doc and it scares them into shape. So, YAY for normal digestion and being able to eat whatever the hell I want.

And YAY for toddlers! Toddler twins are fun. Toddler infants, not so much. Once we turned the 18 month mark, something changed. The increased independence, the activity, it all starting being more fun than work. Now I can sit on the sofa and let them run around me. I can sit them at their little toddler table and let them feed themselves. It's awesome. Of course, with the good is the bad. Miss Scarlet can throw a temper tantrum that I didn't think was possible. She's always been the firey one, but you can really hear the anger now - it has a different quality now than when she was an infant. More focused, more purposeful, more conscious. God help us when she's a teenager.

Got some fantastic duds for Christmas:



And here are a couple of amusing little videos to show what I mean when I say toddler twins are FUN. A little naptime mischief, a little hide and seek, you see what I mean.

Survey Says

I am completely un-celiac.

And apparently, there's nothing pathologically wrong with my insides.

Their best guess is motherfuckin IBS - which I think is a completely empty diagnosis, more just a name for symptoms than anything else. And seriously guys, can't you come up with a name that's little prettier for something that is already awful enough? Throw us a bone here.

But ok. Let's get a big HELL YEAH for the fact that I can eat whatever I want now all the time. (For those of you wondering, I did not, in fact, gain 20 pounds these past 6 weeks, but rather lost 4. So it appears that eating whatever I want works in my favor).

There is a lesson in all this somewhere. Back when I first got diagnosed with celiac, the doctor told me my blood test scores were high enough to diagnose me but not seriously high and that the gold standard test was the biospy of my insides. We went around and around as to whether or not I really had to do that to confirm the diagnosis and he convinced me that he was sure enough.

I should not have feared the scope. The whole experience was really not that bad. I could have saved myself a bunch of time and money and worry and blather that I now have to retract and instead announce that my intestines are just spastic and no one knows why. I could have kept it all to myself and saved myself the embarrassment. Ah well.

I'm going to go celebrate this very strangely bittersweet victory with something FULL OF GLUTEN. HUZZAH.

How to primp for a colonoscopy:

You know you've been blogging too long when the primary way you cope with stress is to turn it into a joke and post it on the internet. Especially if it has to do with poop.

There are few things that I think are less sexy than a colonoscopy - and one of the main ones is what you have to do to prepare for said procedure. For those of you who don't know how to prep for a colonoscopy, here's a quick summary:

The day before the procedure (in my case, TODAY), have a normal breakfast at 8 AM. Then subsist on a liquid (and jello) diet the rest of the day. At noon, take some poop-inducing tablets. At 4, begin drinking 2 liters of nasty salty solution that is supposed to wash out your colon - do this at a rate of 8 oz every ten minutes. Poop your brains out. Special note - drinking that much gross stuff that quickly will make you barfy and bloaty. As if you needed to feel worse.

Needless today, I've been a little anxious these last few days in anticipation not of the procedure itself (since they knock you out), but of the drinking game you play with the nasty salty solution. The pooping my brains out part I'm kind of used to, but to do so all day is exhausting and eventually gets kind of painful in a number of places, so I've been prepping in various ways to make myself feel better. I came to the conclusion that since this will be a very unsexy day for me, I need to start at the top of the sexy scale and that way, I will not be completely disgusted at the end of the day. So here's the primp plan:

1. The week before, by some very sexy shoes, and wear them as often as possible that week to pump yourself up. Mine came in the form of patent leather spiky heels. I wore them to work.
2. Morning of prep day - take a shower. I normally shower after I put Blu and Scarlet to bed at night because it's kind of hectic here in the mornings, but today is special.
3. Put on your makeup (if you do that), that way when you look in the mirror after your ordeal, you won't look as bad as you feel.
4. Get dressed in comfy but not special clothing - you may very well end up laying on the bathroom floor for a while.
5. Gather materials:



Yes, I have every intention of checking my email and sending text messages from the toilet.

6. Don't forget your knitting:



I'm working on the collar of this now...it is complicated and labor-intensive and I'm hoping just distracting enough that I won't notice the waterfall coming out of my ass.

7. Dine on a fine lunch of chicken broth and lime jello. OK, I skipped the chicken broth. In fact, instead of the chicken broth I went out and bought some orange jello as well. I forgot that jello is yummy. I could eat it all day! In fact, I think I will.

8. Take your tablets.

9. Write a blog post while you wait to poop.

caught on video

Blu and Scarlet play this game, let's call if Flex, where they tense up their entire bodies for as long as they can. It cracks them up every time. I have no idea how they learned to do it, but they learned it almost at the same time and when one does it, the other usually responds accordingly. I've been meaning to catch it on video but haven't been able to until tonight. The game made a surprise visit in the middle of another favorite game - Where's Your Nose? - that Blu is finally catching onto, a little later than his sister.

Wool and Gluten

There has been spinning:



For Mother's Day last year I was treated to the weekend away with my girls at the NH Sheep and Wool Fest. There was a big bin in the booth of Nick's Meadow Farm that had bags of wool for $10 each. I dove in head first. I came out with three bumps of lovely wool that looked pretty darn similar to each other - in a color much akin to morning glories:



Two of the three bumps have been spun up and navajo plied, and they now look nothing alike:



Two lessons have been learned:

1. Dye jobs are rarely consistent
2. I need to practice plying

There has been eating.

Chocolate covered pretzels from Trader Joes and Sweet Potato and Ricotta ravioli and an assortment of cheesecakes including pumpkin with cranberries and chocolate with an orange glaze. Oh. My.

But there has not been much sicky. Only two bouts of sickliness since Oct. 22. That's actually less sickly than earlier this fall and summer while on a gluten free diet. Plus - the second set of blood tests (the first being just high enough for a positive diagnosis) came back unequivocally negative.

At this point I am fairly sure my celiac was a misdiagnosis - the possible result of an overenthusiastic, not-appropriately-skeptical doctor with a celiac diagnosis himself.

It's good. Yes.

Still not looking forward to scopes being stuck into each end of me though. Nov 30th. Think good thoughts for me.