packing for Oregon!

I should NOT be sitting here, no sir! I should be packing because the next few days are going to be busy busy! Tomorrow, I have my dr. appt. in the morning, then have to buy 40 pounds of apples, and make those pies with the youth girls. Then Sam and Grace and little Grant will be here on Wednesday for the day, and Wednesday evening the whole fam is coming here for a get together. I need to make a dessert for that, as well as some pies for our own Thanksgiving, which I won't even be present for.

So I can't do my usual procrastination, I need to get packed. I am not an organized person, no matter how much I try. My life would be so much easier if I were, and I'm not giving up on it, but oh dear, why do I put things here and there and everywhere? I am a draper and a dropper, and since the laundry room is no longer the huge clothes closet for 16 children (as the years went by and they each grew up and started taking care of their own clothes, hanging them in their own closets, the laundry room became more of a hodgepodge of bedding, storage for the crock pot, chalk paint supplies, bags of birthday gifts, you know, important stuff!)...now I store lots of my own clothes in that laundry room. That way, if I really want to find particular pair of LulaRoe leggings, I can look in like five different places. I did this recently to no avail, then found them this morning, yay!, on top of my dresser under a pile of important things.

So packing is more of first gathering things, then perhaps doing a load of laundry so things won't start out wrinkled, and in some cases, trying everything on first. I am fitting into more old clothes now, too, which is fun. This is exciting, mostly just to me, but I did hit a goal this morning:
I am finally, FINALLY, back down to the lowest number I hit on this weight loss journey, a number I went down to way back 7 or 8 years ago. I lost 70 pounds! Then, as I've said over and over again, life happened, menopause happened, and that scale stopped going down, and started going back up! So the 70 pounds loss was whittled down to 40-something, and back in June, I decided to get more serious. I started doing intermittent fasting in July, and of course I had some cheat-y times in Norway, after all, Norwegian chocolate!!! I had a few wine tours, on which one HAS to eat pretzels and sometimes pizza, and I've had times when I've gone out to eat with the girls and had whatever I wanted. But getting right back to it, avoiding sugar on a daily basis, eating either one or two meals a day, it's been working, slowly (oh, ever so slowly...for example, I've lost ten pounds in the last two months.). But I feel as if I can maintain this way of life, and if I keep losing at this rate, in a year I'll be at a healthy weight.

Anyway, here's another little before and after...the "before" was actually a sign just like this one, that said, "WELCOME". I didn't like it, I had gotten it for a buck at the dollar store, and it was on the wall covering up a place that we hadn't painted because there was a C.D. player, an under-the-counter one,...then we painted our cabinets, took that C.D. player down, and there was the old paint color behind it. So duh, I had to hang something there!

Anyway, I painted over the welcome sign with a few coats of primer, then mixed black and white chalk paint until I got a nice gray, then added water, painted it on and wiped it off with a paper towel...and made this! It's better than the welcome sign, and when the holidays are over, I'll find something else to cover up the old paint.

(this KITCHEN sign is next!)
You can see what I'm doing here, right? Procrastination at it's finest. I need to do so many things, but dragging out the blogging, so here I sit in my comfy chair.

Another thing, Walmart! I found a red and black plaid blanket/throw there for $4.96, and a five dollar pillow...


Anyway. Enough with the putting it off, I need to go pack. The UPS truck just came with my new hand mixer. I got the cheapest one possible from Kohl's a few weeks ago, as my thrift store one broke. I have a nice Kitchen Aid stand mixer, but you can't really do double or triple batches in it, flour flies all over the place. See? I'm babbling...bye.