It's only been a little over a week, but it feels like two since I blogged. I'm satisfying my urge to write and spill the beans with my blogging on SparkPeople.com, but it's mostly about weight loss, so I'll be keeping this one up for now. I'll try to do better about it so each post won't be so long!
I forgot to mention in the last post that we had reconnected with our former next door neighbor, who gifted us with such lavish items when we left last March that I decided to cross-stitch a Navajo rug design for her. I had found a kit with the pattern, fabric and floss, which was a good thing, because it was May before I was able to retrieve my full stock of floss in every DMC color. I finished the design sometime in June if I remember right. The picture above is the finished and framed project. You can't really tell from this image, but the background you see is entirely stitched. There is no fabric showing through.
We've socialized a little more with our neighbors since we've been here this time. I mentioned in the last post that Mick had invited us to dinner and fed us fresh vegetables from his garden. Not to be outdone, Tess brought over some from her gardens, one here and one at her Colorado home, where she returns every weekend. Tess has also invited us to partake of the yield in the garden here any time we want. For Labor Day, I had fish tacos planned, along with guacamole, but I had forgotten to buy tomatoes and those that Tess had given us were long gone. Since I had invited Mick for dinner, we took some off the cherry tomato vine right outside our door, and they were so delicious! When Mick arrived he brought acorn and fairytale pumpkin squash. The latter, unfortunately, was picked before it was ripe, a result of another neighbor's too-enthusiastic 9-year-old harvesting everything he could see in Mick's garden the night we were over there. Then when Tess got here after the long weekend the next day, she had about a quart of large cherry or plum tomatoes for us. We'll be so spoiled by the time the gardens are finished that we may have to move to summer year-round country to cope.
The latest bounty was heirloom peaches from trees in the canyon that have been left to go wild. They were tiny, but very ripe, sweet, juicy and yummy. Since they were so ripe I could tell they wouldn't last, I made miracle cobbler with them and shared with Tess and the two seasonals who are living in the bunkhouse. It was the first time I had had a chance to visit with Gretchen, and the first time I had met Gayle. I served my portion (which I wanted with milk) and Budd's double serving, then took the rest of the pan next door and demanded they eat the rest. Tess reported that she thought it was delicious, too. I was so glad I had given it away when I ate mine. If there had been any left, I would have broken discipline and gone after more.
All these fresh vegetables are certainly helping with my meal planning in my new lifestyle of eating healthy, too. With the help of the food tracker and exercise tracker in SparkPeople and the data on calorie burn from my BodyBugg, I've managed to average just under a pound and a half of weight lost per week since I started using SP. The seven pounds I put on between New Year's and getting back from my family reunion at Easter are gone, and so are four of their little buddies. Good riddance! I'm still not hungry, in fact I'm eating more volume of food and more variety than ever, but because of the healthy choices it's under 1500 calories a day. Even when I have peach cobbler. ;-)
I joined a challenge team on the site, too, which has upped my exercise from a reluctant 40 minutes every day or two, to cardio and strength training every day, averaging over an hour. Between that, the social aspect, and my tutoring which started again this week, I barely have time to read or cross-stitch. But that's ok, that doesn't burn calories, and I'm on a mission to burn as many as I can! In fact, I'm beginning to bore even myself talking about it. I do have to say one more thing, though, and that is that dodging the heavy equipment that's tearing up all the pavement in the park is quite an adventure. I never know when my route will be open or I'll have to take a detour. If they tear up our road, I guess I'll have to jog in place in the house.
Let's see...since I blogged here, my daughter Laurie and her husband have found out they are having a girl. She's quite relieved, because we were all demanding one, and she felt a lot of pressure about it. Silly girl, we would have loved a boy, too. But now everyone is happy, including Laurie and Huggy, so it's all good.
Oh--we went to Farmington, NM the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend, travelling through Tsaile and Lukachukai, up over the Chuska range past the Shiprock formation and through the town of Shiprock. On the way we saw many vendors on the roadside with fresh melons, corn, and something called kneel-down bread that we weren't familiar with. In Farmington, we found most of the items we wanted to buy, groceries that included fish, no salt tomatoes and most of the items I hadn't found at the local Basha's. We had spent the night, so were disappointed to find most of the vendors gone on the way back. We did stop at a stand with the kneel-down bread to ask what it was and buy some to try. It turned out to be a dish made from fresh corn which has been cut from the cob, smashed in a machine made for that purpose, then packed together back into the husks and roasted in the coals of a fire. It's very reminiscent of tamales texture-wise, but with a flavor more like that of fresh corn with a hint of woodsmoke. It's good, and would go perfectly with chili.
Backing up, the scenery on the drive over the mountain was breathtaking. After winding slowly up some very steep grades to 7000 or 8000 feet, you suddenly see the drop down the other side, with the Shiprock out in the middle virtually all by itself. The road itself isn't too steep, but in places you feel as if you'll just fly off the side of the mountain and make that long drop to the desert floor more than 3000 feet below. On the way back we encountered a couple of Navajo women whose small car had overheated as it climbed up. Near the top, it just quit on them, and they were parked across the entrance to a side road. We stopped to see if Budd could help them, and fortunately had several large containers of water in the trunk, so he was able to help and they were soon on their way.
This weekend we are going to try again to take a four-wheel drive vehicle into the canyon, accompanied by Mick, who was driving on the ill-fated canyon attempt last March. Presumably, Mick knows the canyon better now, too, since he's had six more months to explore it since then...except for the times it was even more flooded than last spring. Fortunately it's dryer now, so I'll be able to report on that trip next time.
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