We moved into the house as it was, almost 8 months ago. I guess when the days started to get longer and there was more sun, the urge to finally renovate become hard to ignore. We decided to paint.

My friend suggested (through e-mail unfortunately, she is in Germany now) that the way it is done you invite friends, start a grill and tell them they need to ear their food. Problem is, all our friends around think we are at least insane to paint our own house….

Anyway, it isn’t what I wanted to write about. So I was looking through back issues of my favorite woman magazine “All you” (the only magazine I think there is actually something to read) for some color ideas. OK, so I learned that you can choose tonal scheme (paint in few shades of same color), harmonious scheme (colors next to each other on color wheel) or contrasting scheme (colors opposite on color wheel). Definitely the contrasting scheme was the one I was looking for. Just… not green and pink. I don’t now why, but there were many examples how to make your house/living room/bedroom/any room green, green with yellow, or green with pink. If I wanted blue, I had to figure it out myself.

Opposite to blue is orange, in case you are too lazy to look at color wheel and check. And if you think it had to look awful, check yourself.

A trip to Walmart and a few finishing touches (just look at the serendipitous wall plates) and the room turned into something new. I love the way my husband turned the dirty white/manila or whatever into plates perfectly matching the room. Especially that the trip to the neighborhood home improvement stores make us realize, that all the choices we have are white, black, gold and our “favorite”….

When last August I wrote about my cholesterol problems, I thought bad things about my doctor and even worse about the idea of not eating meat. I guess after my semi-annual visit with him, which happened more like 8 month after previous, I feel actually satisfied. My bad cholesterol went down from 170 to 110, and my weight went down as well, 20 pounds less. And I owe everything my home-made diet.

Few simple rules:

1) no red meat- turkey and chicken are fine, as long as you take off skin, and from time to time pork. No beef. No problem- you can buy turkey ground meat for meatballs, turkey hamburgers, turkey breakfast sausage and bratwurst, and probably bunch of other stuff I haven’t discovered yet.

2) no fat or low fat, whatever available as such. Milk, yogurt, even pretzels ;).

3) only 1 serving of everything. This was the toughest, I think. Really, try once put in your bowl a serving of cereal…

Well, of course, you have to exercise as well. Especially that after few month of nicely loosing weight, one day it stopped. I needed something more. Old treadmill our friends didn’t need any more came in handy. As much as I hate this device, I use it for about 30 min each day. 7 days a week. Sometimes 6 days a week…. No excuses. I watch TV or read a book or magazine, so it is less boring than I thought. And is working!

Have you ever bought dry ice at Wal-Mart paying with business credit card? You have no idea what you are missing. I had to do it 3 time during past week. It seems unbelievable, but each time I faced different set of obstacles. Now looking back, I think my first time was most successful, as the cashier had no idea how to do that and the manager was rather polite. Although it took her 15 minutes and 3 trips to office to find the right key. Yesterday, I couldn’t convince cashier (different one, unfortunately) that dry ice is not the same as regular ice and I cannot pick it up on my way out. Not only because the ice is in locked container….. Today, although I insisted I need to fill up provided box, I got two larger pieces in Wal-Mart disposable bag…. Couldn’t fit the stuff in my styrofoam box to drive back to lab.

I think the quotient of cashier’s intelligence and the product price needs to be constant. Next time I will add the 3 miles to see how it works in Hy-Vee.