Thursday, November 13, 2008

Great Retreat, Healthy Honey Now Walking

Our church had the most attendees ever at Forest Home last weekend - around 420 people and lots of kids. Our speaker, Jim Burns, had a great acrostic for maintaining/improving relationships - AWE. AWE stands for affection, warmth and encouragement. I really appreciated when he said, (my paraphrase) "If you have reservations about affection, I have three words for you. Get. Over. It." I agree wholeheartedly. Human beings need that good stuff. Jim Burns's stuff can be found at: HomeWord.com. I find him to be much more conservative than me and still, he's got something to say that's truly worth hearing.

My honey and I worked KP for all the meals. I was the big enchilada for KP and got good reviews. Just like the retreat itself, we had the most people I've ever seen setting up and cleaning up at meals. They made it so easy to lead. The KP'ers took initiative and hardly a discouraging word was heard.

Marianne and I have been playing a game we call Password. It's been a long time since I've seen that show, so it may not be exactly Password according to Hoyle(?). One person thinks of a word and then gives a one word clue. The other person gets one guess and then the "giver" gives another one word clue to the "receiver". Sometimes you get the word on the first try like when I said "Redenbacher" and she guessed the word was popcorn. She only took two word clues, sidewalk and concrete, to get pavement. (Guess which word took her six clues?!) We even played Password as we were falling asleep.

Monday morning after we got home I weighed myself and found things going in the right direction. I was down to 117.1 kilos vs. 118.5 last week which means a loss of approximately 3 pounds. Tuesday was our anniversary and we started off by walking almost three miles at Batiquitos lagoon with our dog, Mellow. It was great to spend the day together and nice of our country to have a holiday on our anniversary. (A Veteran's Day aside - Marianne's brother-in-law was in Vietnam and her grandfather was in the horse cavalry(!) in WWI. We are not quite sure if we got the whole story about her uncle who we were told died after hostilities officially ended in Korea when her mom was a kid. My dad was in the Navy, but didn't see action in Brownsville, Texas and my uncle Fred served, too. Kicked my dad across the room with only his reflexes coming out of a nap once, but that's another story. My brother almost went to Vietnam. I'm pretty sure he got a low-medium draft number and then the war was over.)

We went out to dinner at Outback Steakhouse and shared some mild wings and the Alice Springs Chicken. More Password with just the two of us. The Alice Springs Chicken works for the high protein/low card lifestyle if you substitute broccoli, which they serve crisp, the way we like it. Oh, remember not to use that sugary dipping sauce to keep the carbs low.

All of the above and technology problems combined with Palomar College being closed MONDAY meant that I didn't get back online until yesterday. You should be hearing from me more often in the near future. Keep walking.