See, I haven't given up!

It's been a good two weeks since I've PickleToothpasted, but I am determined not to abandon this poor little lonely blog.  My calc final happened.  My mom coming into town happened.  Now things are settling back down and I am officially in vacation mode.  Vacation mode being; make plenty of well intentioned plans to go out and do things around town on my own for quality alone time and then end up hanging out at home and puttering around.  So I will putter, and I will enjoy it.  Cuz puttering is one of thet things I like to do best, as long as I don't do too much of it.  So here are some of the things I have been thinking about or occupied with of late.

The south beach thing. 
I'm still doing it.  I've had some intentional "treat days" where I've eaten what I've wanted and I've had some unintentional fall-backs where I've eaten what was available or convenient, but overall, I'm still going pretty strong.  Initial water based weight loss seemed to have leveled out a little over a week ago.  So now I'm on to slower weight/fat loss.  Which is fine.  I miss the drama of dropping 5 lbs in a couple of days, but I'm smart enough and to know that that's unrealistic for a longer period of time.  Bouncing around on and off the plan more than I intended for the last week has kinda slowed things down a bit, but I am still determined and hopeful.  I found a great blog, Kalyn's Kitchen, that has lots of great South Beachy recipes that I can draw inspiration from.  I think that my current weakness is blue cheese.  I'm not supposed to eat it, cuz it's super high in fat, but I have been anyways.  Think it's time to stop that.  I should really make some killer tarragon vinagrette dressing and lay off the blue cheese.

Personal Finance Adventure For the Win!
I'm coming to terms with the notion that personal finances are something that have to be monitored, recorded and analyzed if we want to make any progress toward saving money and improving credit for buying a house.  And, I have also been coming to terms with the fact that it's gonna be me who does this, and really, I should just ask for Marshall's cooperation rather than participation in this matter.  So, I've signed up with Mint, an online personal finance program that can track and categorize spending.   As long as it's done with a card or check.  I haven't really found a way to enter cash transactions in a terribly easy way.  There are a lot of features that I wish mint did better, but as a start, it's better than nothing and I haven't found anything I like better so far.