The Sewing Mom

If you’re like me and want to shed a few pounds this may be the way to do it. It’s called the Skip-A-Day diet and it seems to be rather unique as far as dieting goes. This diet has an Eat Day where you will consume enough nutritional food to get you through the following day which is a Diet Day. There is even a test diet at skipaday.com so you can see if the diet is right for you or not. The test diet will make suggestions for what to eat on your Eat Day at breakfast, snack, lunch, dinner and even a bed time snack. For the Diet Day the site suggests water and chicken broth and even provides mental tactics to overcome cravings or hunger.

According to the Skip-A-Day Diet website, “The Skip-A-Day Diet can turn-off your appetite up to 48 hours. Your body will be using stored fat for nourishment while your appetite is shut off. While you’re sleeping, some of your stored fat will be used to replenish your reserve energy supply. If you eat nothing at all on diet day, your body will draw on your reserve fat and use it that day and night. This means you will be losing weight even while you are asleep.” Get the details at skipaday.com.

What I do like about this diet plan is that it is inexpensive. There are no special foods or pre-packaged meals to buy. You, and only you, decide if it’s the right diet for you. It is my opinion that you should talk to your doctor before ever starting any diet and just like most diets, exercise along with the diet will help burn more fat.

Just when I thought the potty training with the puppy was going well she has the biggest, worst, nastiest, smelliest, accident to date! 

I keep the front hall blocked off with boxes so Plinko can’t get into the front hall, the dining room, my husband’s office, or the 1/2 bathroom.  She’s managed to get through on a rare occasion, and each time, she has either tinkled or pooped in the hall or dining room.  So, for over three months, I’ve had ugly packing boxes blocking the hallway.  Totally unattractive, but it definitely serves a purpose.

I’m not sure how one of the boxes got moved, but while my daughter and I were eating our dinner, Plinko quietly slipped into the dining room.  She wears a rabies tag and a name tag on her collar so we can always hear her tags jingling together and we know where she is.  Well, it got awfully quiet.  I jumped up and saw the box was moved out of position and sure enough, standing in front of the front door looking back at me, innocently, was Plinko.

The smell hit me before I saw it, all over the dining room carpet.  I don’t know what she ate but it came out like soft serve and was soaking into the carpet fast.  My daughter was gagging just handing me the roll of paper towels!  I spent 30 minutes picking it up, getting the piles out of the house and then using vinegar water followed by soapy water on the carpet.  YUCK!

Thanks for letting me vent, I feel better now!

Linked to: Electric Venom

Have you heard that song?! It’s really sort of funny and yet sad that I can so relate to that! With the exception of the occasional Martguerita, I’ve sort of tried to stay away from tequila for a long while now. My husband feels the same way, especially after waking up on a Pacific Beach one morning, while the tide was coming in, only to find his clothes and shoes folded up neatly beside him, not remembering how he got there! But, for many, it’s making a comeback, a renaissance of sorts!

Did you know that there are actually over 700 different tequilas to choose from! The Tequila Guy is here to help pick just the right one for the occasion! He can even tell you some interesting facts about the history of tequila and even how tequila is made. This guy does his research, so check him out!

Wow!  What an eye opener!  I just had lunch with my daughter at her school, in the school cafeteria!  An experience every parent should endure!

Actually, it is sort of cool that at my daughter’s school, parents can have lunch with their kids any day they choose.  Just sign in at the office and go directly to the cafeteria!  I think it’s pretty cool, not that I plan on making a habit out of it or anything.  Today though, we were out of lunch meat, so I had to bring my daughter a lunch anyway since she didn’t care for the hot lunch choices.

 So, I headed to the grocery, bought some ready made sandwiches at their deli and also picked up a package of lunch meat for the rest of the week.  I bought drinks and a box of the Hostess 100 calorie pack ding dong things (these look very interesting!).  I then headed to school.

Fortunately, they have a special set of tables set up for parents to eat at with their kids so you’re not right in the thick of all that chatter and activity!  Anyway, I enjoyed just having my daughter point out different kids, telling me their names, so now I can put faces to the name when she’s telling me about her school day.  It makes things more interesting!

I’ve always wanted to be better at investing, I’m somewhat gun shy about getting into the stock market. While in college, my finance teacher was also a stock broker and financial advisor by day so my husband and I decided to work with him. He gave us very good, sound advice and we bought into our first mutual funds. Since then, we’ve been sort of out on our own. Although we have a financial advisor who handles our IRA’s and such, we’ve never really purchase stock.

Now I’ve found an online source where I can have help picking stocks and be a member of a group with similar financial goals. I know that by the time I read stock prices and information in the newspaper or other source, that information is all ready old and outdated. By working with a group online like MyWallSt.net I know that I can get up to the minute information to make the best decision for me.

At MyWallSt.net you can join a social network, create a profile for yourself and get involved in picking stocks with others. The site has up to date financial news coverage to help investors stay abreast of activity that could affect stock prices. It is a good place to learn, along with others, about the ins and outs of investing.

WOW!  What a day we had yesterday!  My daughter and I took it upon ourselves to figure out how to upload video to YouTube.  This was a huge challenge for us, we are not too tech savvy. 

I have two computers, a desktop that I inherited from my Dad a couple of years ago and my laptop which is about the same age.  I also own a nice Sony HDD Handycam which my daughter has become quite good at using, she is able to quickly upload video from the camera to the desktop computer which is the computer that has the camera software loaded on it.  Unfortunately, the camera software doesn’t allow for much editing and the video files are too large to be uploaded to the internet or email.  So, we had to find a different way.

 I had heard that Windows Movie Maker was a free, easy way to get video to the web.  So, a couple of weeks ago I had made sure that it was installed on the desktop computer.  Yesterday we decided to give it a try.  My daughter uploaded the video we had made to the computer and then we attempted to open Movie Maker.  Bad news, every time we tried to open the program it said there was an error.  I have no idea what the error is and don’t have a clue how to fix it.  Maybe I need to uninstall it and then reinstall it, that might be the easiest.

In the mean time, I discovered that I have Windows Movie Maker on my laptop as well, and, the program would open successfully.  Now, how to get the video onto the laptop.  I plugged the camera directly into a USB port on the laptop and opened Movie Maker.  However, the program kept telling me that it couldn’t download the file because the correct “codec” was missing.  Okay, for someone like me, wth is a codec?

After several hours of different attempts, I finally clicked help on the Movie Maker program and did a search on codec.  I discovered that a specific box needed to be checked in the program file and it would then automatically update for any needed codec.  Okay then, now we’re getting somewhere!  I checked the box and had to reboot my laptop, twice, but finally, amazingly, my video suddenly appeared in Movie Maker!  I about fell off the sofa, I was so excited! 

Okay, now it’s there, what do I do with it?  Well, Movie Maker insisted that I edit in some form, so I added a Title shot and then a credits shot.  Then I clicked upload to the web.  I thought I was doing great, until it said I needed to register with a webhosting site (and YouTube was not one of their choices).  So, I selected on of the two choices given, registered for my free trial, and then uploaded.  YAY!  It worked. So I thought.  Now it was uploaded to a site I’d never heard of and I really wanted it to be on YouTube.  In the mean time, I disconnected the camera from the computer (thinking it was all saved) and went about trying to learn more.

First thing I discovered was that it had not saved the file to my computer, rather it was using my camera’s file.  So, when I disconnected the camera, the video went away.  OMG!  I wanted to scream.  We’re now in the 6th hour of trying to figure this out.  My daughter is feeling sick, she’s coughing and needs to go to bed.  I get her settled in for the night and I return to the demon video files.

After almost another hour, I finally get the file reloaded into Movie Maker and then I notice the option “save to computer”.  I thought maybe I should give this a shot so I did.  It worked!  Now I was able to go directly to YouTube and upload the saved file and within a half hour after that , it went live!  My first ever video on YouTube!  We had succeeded!  Now I need to write down what I did so I will be able to do it again, quicker!

By the way, the video is in my previous post if you want to take a look!