Birthday!

Monday:

Happy birthday to me! 48 today. I like to think of it as 'going up a level', i.e. gaining experience, wisdom, skills etc, not as losing something (youth).

Seeing the doctor on Friday seems to have reignited my enthusiasm for losing weight, and despite it being my birthday weekend with restaurant dinner (with cake) on Saturday night and people over in the afternoon (with snacks) yesterday, I have lost weight this week and I am down to 70.3 kg. That is an official loss of 1.3 kg but last Monday's weight was a blip and I consider it an actual loss of 0.8 kg (still awesome) from my long plateau of 71.1 kg. The thing with the treats was, I didn't overeat. I had 2/3 or less of my restaurant meal, half my slice of cake. A few snacks yesterday. I enjoyed what I ate and stopped when I was no longer enjoying it enough to justify the overfull stomach/gaining weight. That is true progress.

I exercised hard for an hour on Saturday, including lots of big arm movements, and yesterday my upper back muscles were very sore! I felt quite proud of myself.

We went shopping for new mattresses for everyone yesterday morning. Our current ones are all pretty old, and Aiden had a few night-time accidents when he was younger... I did research online first to narrow down the choices and find End Of Financial Year sales, so we only went to one store and lay on a few beds instead of traipsing around all day. It will be a couple of weeks before they are delivered. Exciting!

Birthdays in this house always start with everyone piling into the big bed so the birthday person can open her/his presents. Because it was a work/school day, that was it for the morning, everyone had to leave. I made my own bacon and orange juice. I don't usually drink juice, or anything other than water and tea, but freshly squeezed is so good! Perfect for a special occasion. Then I faffed around on the Internet for a while instead of exercising, before going out.

I had thought of buying myself a new handbag, but the only ones I really liked were around $500! Maybe that is normal, I’m not really a handbag connoisseur (I own two, one big one small) but I couldn’t justify it to myself considering I don’t actually need a new one. When I do get one, I want something with a bit of personality. Regardless, I had a good time wandering around looking. I did buy a couple of books and some little pastries to share at home. I had a light lunch - anticipating afternoon tea with the kids and dessert tonight.

Oh, one thing I did that I got a lot of pleasure from, I went to the Lindt chocolate shop and chose myself some chocolates. They have a big display with bowls of all the different flavours of truffle balls and other individually wrapped treats. You can purchase by weight, or you can fill a gift box as full as you can get as long as the lid still closes and stays on, and the gift boxes were on special. I spent quite a long time carefully filling the littlest gift box with mathematical precision - I weighed it when I got home and I did very well! With the discount, I paid a third what I would have by weight. I haven’t eaten any yet, I just like gloating over them.

We already went out to dinner on Sat, so we’ll have one of my favourite dinners at home tonight and a quiet night in where it’s warm. It has just started raining so I think that was a good choice!

I got an email from the librarian who interviewed me a couple of weeks ago, asking me for my referee contact details. So that is a good sign, I am obviously still among the contenders. Hopefully a part time position will become available.