It's Work Until It's Art

My plan is to not talk about work on this blog, that's why its called life away from the office chair. But I did a project for the company I work for and just had to write about it. I mean, really, Its not considered work when its actually an art like project. And after all, I did do this at home.

The company needed a new sign. It was looking really bad. It was short and the bushes have grown too tall for anyone to see it from the road. I was going to redo it but it was too rotten, so I volunteered to make a new sign from scratch. Little did I know this would be a pretty big project to do. I didn't mind though. I love to paint.

The first thing I did was went to the local hardware store for some lumber and then picked out the perfect "yellow"paint, and some brushes.

Thanks to my wonderful husband, he handled picking out the right kind of wood to use and cut it to down to the size I needed. Then I painted it with a few coats of the yellow paint. I wanted to make sure the paint was on good enough to make a good seal. I used the old sign to trace the letters onto paper then cut them out to make a stencil. that was really hard considering I could barely see through the paper to trace. A lot was guessed at and therefore, really, there are different shapes to the letters than the original, but hey, its my design now right?

Anyone that knows me, knows that I have zero patience and I'm surprised I didn't cut my finger off during this process. My daughter was just itching to help so I let her trace some to the letters onto the wood from the stencil once I had them cut out.

Now Its time to paint the letters! Being a lefty, I have to paint right to left so my hand does not smear the paint. Just another obstacles I've had to deal with all my life. If your left handed, you know what I mean.

This is scary! I'm giving myself  ZERO confidence at this point and wondering what in the world have I gotten myself into. I carefully and tediously painted on the letters and the boarder. I was really afraid of messing it up. One wrong mark and its ruined. However, it does have imperfections, but from the view of a passerby, they may never notice.

Wah Lah!. Its finally finished.

The boss seemed to liked it. Can you say 'brownie points"?

I want to also give thanks to the mechanic here at the company for making a taller signpost and hanging it for me. I'm sure that was a job in itself too.

Diet Plan/Game

Everyone in my household is always trying to diet cut back on eating so much. We are going on vacation in a month and would love to get down a size. We have found that breads and sweets are our weakness. After different plans and ideas that have never worked, we have come up with a new plan that we hope will be fun like a game.

The first idea was to cut out ALL breads, pastas and sweets. That's seemed a little drastic all at once for everyone. We figured we would not last long doing that so we started with just saying NO SWEETS.

Here's the plan...If either of us eat something sweet, we have to put a dollar in the jar. At the end of 30 days, the one that has lost the most pounds, gets to keep all the money in the jar. I'm hoping this works. My daughter was all into the idea once money was involved. ha, ha.
However, my personal plan is still not to eat any rice or pasta and only eat healthy breads but still lighten up on the intake.
This is pretty much how my meals have looked so far.

Breakfast-English muffin and southwestern omelet

(OK, so  may need to cut out so much butter too. ha)

Dinner-Homemade chicken salad in a romaine lettuce wrap with tomatoes.

We have been making trips to the farmers market for a healthier choice. We will be doing a lot of veggi grilling and any meats we want!

Note: There are some sweets we consider healthy, such as breakfast bars, honey, jello, or sugar free desserts.

Wish us luck and check back next month for an update on our success.

Update: Its a month later. This didnt work to well for us. I only lost 2 pounds, my daughter lost 1 pound. My husband did not loose any pounds and hes the one that stayed away from the sweets the most! There was 23 dollars collected. Guess i'll try something else.