To begin with: for those of you who loved these shoes:

They're from Bass. I love them.Now, I have to explain. In all my concern over what to wear to the wedding, Andy finally said, rather vehemently, "Who are you trying to impress? Why do you feel like you have to impress and stand out?" I was rather shocked at this implication and I returned, rather vehemently, "I don't want to impress anybody. That's the whole point. I want to fly completely under the radar and unnoticed, and the only way to do that at this wedding is to have an outfit that is just so."So, with that explanation, here's what I wore to the rehearsal dinner, which was held at an upscale Italian banquet facility (I don't know why the picture turned out blurry, Andy took it in a hurry, sorry...):

And here’s me after arriving home late the next day from a very party-ful wedding and being quite exhausted, stretched and wrinkly:

So that’s it… oh!  This dress!  I fell in love with this dress years ago in an Ann Taylor shop but ultimately decided that it wasn’t quite justifiable spending $150 on, well, anything at that point in my life.  So, I regretfully turned away from it… only to have one of these dresses, in just my size, turn up on the clearance rack of the outlet store near my house for $20 about six months later.  Amazing, huh?

Two separate events, on warm, sunny, pre-Memorial days with young, very cool bride and groom:

1. 5 pm rehearsal dinner, private room in a nice Italian restaurant
2. 1 pm wedding/4:30 pm reception, church and banquet facility

I am completely at a loss as to what to wear to each event.  I have been feeling very particular about my clothes recently, for who knows what reason.  So I went and scrounged through the depths of both my closet and the mall to find something, anything – fabrics or patterns that I fancied, thought would work together, or just didn’t look hideous.  Pardon the hard-to-see photos, as I took them as I chucked and draped clothes all over my apartment.

Please, please tell me what to do.  Is there a seed of two outfits anywhere in here?

Last Saturday I was putting together Andy’s favorite egg dish for his birthday breakfast (you can find the original recipe, which I have altered significantly over time, here).  Problem was, as I put together the dish, I discovered that we didn’t have any sour cream.  The sour cream is what adds most of the richness to the souffle and since I was going all-out to make my foods decadent for Andy’s sake, I was pretty bummed.

But never fear, dear readers.  Just in the nick of time, Andy had a rare moment of culinary brilliance (or maybe desperation at the possible loss of those extra calories) and suggested that I just “toss that Greek junk you’ve been eating for lunch in there.”

The “junk” was Greek yogurt, and I’d read it is excellent for cooking because of its higher stability than most dairy products.  So, toss I did.  And I have to say that it was really the best the dish has EVER turned out.  There was something special about the consistency of the eggs, and I’m positive it had to do with the Greek yogurt.  It was 0% fat, but still had much more thick, creamy heft than even full-fat sour cream - so we actually gained in creaminess while lowering the fat content.

But you don’t have to cook with it – that was the first time I had!  I can’t sing the glories of a bowl of plain Greek yogurt topped with GoLean crunch and berries enough.  To this tangy-loving girl, it’s bliss.  Grapenuts, bananas and honey is a particularly great combination as well.  It’s a solid breakfast or lunch; I have frequently eaten it for dinner when Andy’s away; and saute-ing up walnuts, rosemary, butter and honey for a hot topping turns it into a (DELICIOUS!) dessert.

I guess the whole point to this post is to encourage YOU to think about using Greek yogurt when and where you can (it’s relatively expensive – but for one person, a whole container can provide about four good meals, as I usually only eat about 1/2 cup at a time).  Here is the website for my favorite brand, Fage - and they also have some neat recipes!

I’ve always been mildly obsessed with water.

Sometime in grade school, I remember having a particularly frightening lecture at school on the importance of imbibing 8 glasses of water a day.  I came home from school very determined to set my poor soul on the right path, so I poured myself a big glass of water and determined to pour myself a new one on the stroke of every hour.

About 2.5 hours in, I was dying.  I remember sitting there in the living room, staring at that half glass of water on the coffee table and groaning.

I kept at it and by high school and college, I was a pro at drinking water.  I had to ban 32-ounce Nalgenes from my life because they’d be gone so fast, I was destroying my study productivity running to the bathroom all the time.  I think I was drinking up to 100 ounces of liquid a day sometimes.

But upon beginning to work full time, have my own apartment and experience all the busy-ness of adult life, I suddenly fell into, for me, the ufamiliar territory of dehydration.  I was either too busy or would forget to drink water.  And to complicate matters, upon realizing I was severely thirsty of an evening, I’d down about 35 ounces of water in the space of ten minutes, flooding my system and often getting dizzy from the impact.  Not a good thing!

So last week, after another terrifying lecture, this one from my mother on the damage I was doing to my kidneys and in horrendous fear of kidney stones, kidney failures and other terrifying things, I made a vow to somehow regulate my wildly fluctuating habits of drinking.

I’m learning to sip water over the course of a day.  I fill a 32-ounce water bottle in the morning, keep it with me at all times and drink 2 ounces every 30 minutes, or about one good sip every 15 minutes.  Torture, I say, torture – both to remember to drink, and not to gulp.  It really is training and I’m nowhere near learning my lesson.

Why is it so hard to be healthy?

I’m a little overwhelmed and terrified by the vitamin game.  There’s so much necessary in order to be sufficiently full of all the necessary vitamins and minerals.  Especially critical stuff like folic acid and iron.  Foods that tend to have high quantities of these things (like beef for iron, and turnip greens for folic acid) are either expensive, hard to come by or difficult to eat every day.  Even “rich” foods usually have very low percentages of the daily value.

It seems to require a high level of regulation of diet and a high consciousness of how much of different foods to eat in a day.  For example, for my usually-deficient iron levels, I used to think that as long as I had ground beef 3 times a week, snacked on dried apricots, and got a spinach salad on the alternate days, I would be golden in the iron department.  When I started looking at actual iron levels in foods… I realized that I need to be eating the beef PLUS the apricots PLUS the spinach PLUS about five other items in order to get enough… just for one day.  And folic acid is the same.  Folic acid is so hard to come by naturally that a supplement (usually as part of a multivitamin) is essential for women of child-bearing age.

All of this leaves me feeling like a confused, discouraged, hopelessly deficient puppy.  Sad, isn’t it?

But you know what?  I’m sick of lethargy.  And tiredness.  And forgetfulness.  And the sickness that comes with that inevitable once-a-month flood of anemia.  And I can do something about it – and probably lose weight and feel better in the process.

So I am beginning a quest.  I have a specific goal for my iron intake, plus folic acid.  I’m going to start by charting everything I eat each day, and every few days tally up how much iron I’m getting, and slowly adjust my diet from there.  We’ll see how it goes!