The life in my favorite park has been mostly snuffed out by a diminishing number of sunlight hours and bursts of Georgia cold. Still, I seem to be able to find a cold kind of beauty in its dry state, with its suddenly open passageways revealed after all the foliage protecting it dies. Still, before life comes death, and we are in a season of death now, and every part of the park is reaching out, waiting for spring.
I love the color this Chameleon took on when coming over to check us out. If I wanted a nice display pet, It’d be something like this! :)
Jeremy is officially part of the family. :)
New Family Ornament
Jeremy and I had the pleasure of attending the Atlanta Botanical Gardens Garden Lights display this year. My wedding photographer Uzma arranged a photo walk and we had bought the groupon just a couple weeks before. :) The lights are beautiful and every photog will have a blast taking shots.
Here are a few of mine.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!
Holiday season is in full swing around my life. We’ve been going to home after home, party after party and it’s only just begun. One of the things I like about what I consider “winter break” is sleeping in, goofing off from lunch to about 6pm and then dolling up and running off somewhere to do fun things with fun people. Also I absolutely love gifts. If you’ve ever heard of The Five Love Languages, my number one is gifts. :) I love to give to express my love as well as receive, making Christmas up there in favorite day of the year!
Check out some of my favorite knick knacks I got for myself, and from my friends and family for Christmas this year and last.
I love the classic feel of a black and white. The finest details look like they are etched into their surroundings.
Fingerprints especially.. they arebeautifully ridged, wonderfully human, mixing with nature in a monochrome world.
Nature in high contrast tends to deeply move me.
So I promised an update on the fitbit. I don’t know what to say except that it is awesome. I didn’t realize how little sleep I was getting, how many calories I was stuffing into my face, and how sedentary I was until I got the thing. So these last two weeks, I’ve lost about 5 lbs without trying to do anything really. Just being aware of the fitbit stats and trying to stay under the recommended calorie limit. Yeah. It’s that good.
That little flower is going to help me stay aware, if nothing else. A few things I noticed:
1. I have a desk job for most of the day and with the evenings being dark and/or damp, I find myself indoors a lot. Coding and photo processing are both really physically inactive activities…and are the two activities I do the most. With a 3 story home, it’s not hard to get in the required flights of stairs but the step count is always a challenge. Jeremy, however, with his engineering job taking him to laboratories, offices and around machines all day gets his 10k steps before he even gets home. I need to make an extra effort to get about 2 hours of really simple exercise in per day to get that number or 1 hour of intense exercise.
2. I’ve isolated the culprit that’s really impacting my weight and health. Chocolate. My diet otherwise consists of low carbs, moderate protein and veggies/fruits. And then I eat an entire terry’s chocolate orange. Typical day is oatmeal and 100 cal popcorn pack and a light lunch if any throughout the day, and a salad and some grilled meat for dinner…finished off with something chocolate. I don’t make or eat things like pancakes, or cake, or fried anything, or pasta, or bread. I don’t have a love affair with bread like most of this country probably because I didn’t really grow up eating bread/pasta. I did grow up on rice but I have made rice once in the last two years in my house. More than a third of my daily calories can be chocolate just because it is so calorie dense. It’s like Jeremy and soda. He lost 20 lbs just getting off soda. I should really just step up and toss out the chocolate. Thanks MyFitnessPal for revealing this atrocity.
3. The Aria, the fitbit fitness scale, is amazing. It tracks our weight and body fat percentage wirelessly. The BFP can use some work but the weight part works just fine. I can’t escape knowing that I’m putting on weight over the weekend and taking it off over monday/Tuesday. It’s an unhealthy cycle, and I know it. Being constantly aware is really helpful. Also my body fat percentage is awful. AWFUL. I need to lost about 12 body fat percentage points. I never knew.. and now it’s scaring me.
4. There’s something on myfitnesspal that tells you your weight in 5 weeks if everyday were like the day you’re currently closing out. It’s extra impetus for me to do well that day because I can extrapolate it and see results. Nothing is more disappointing than looking 5 weeks ahead and losing 2 lbs. I want to look 5 weeks ahead and lose a substantial amount if only because i know I have plenty to lose! I am aware it’s just a psychological trick but I’ll take all the help I can get to improve my daily movement/calorie intake ratios.
Haha. :] MyFitnessPal isn’t really part of fitbit but the easy integration is awesome.Overall, I love it. Tracking and awareness is always important, in every facet of my life. It’s like mint.com for my body.
We visited Freeman’s Mill park last weekend. It’s off 316, almost halfway to Athens. There’s a small retaining pond, miniature waterfalls, and an old grist mill whose exterior you could admire. There was only half a mile or so of walking trail but was pleasant. A leaf on the granite caught my eye:
This is Rachael. I found her in the woods.