Time to weigh-in

I am 265.5 this morning.  Shockingly that's a three pound loss since last Wednesday.  I am pretty excited for that.  Four more and I will be back to the 261 just before we went to Evey's house five weeks ago.  My short term goal is still 255, the weight from Lowell's wedding in July of 2014.

Today we are eating lunch at the Deland NARFE meeting.  Mark has been invited to speak, and I have been invited to sing the national anthem.  Sweet.  Pictures will be up tomorrow! LOL

Tonight I am throwing a surprise birthday party with a Carvel ice cream cake and mini-cupcakes for a member of my synagogue choir.  If I'm smart, I'll watch what I take.

Tomorrow night we are eating out at an hibachi place nearby with the ladies and their spouses from my Thursday morning Mah Jongg group. Then the stretch of eating out is over, for a while anyway.

I went back to Guys and Dolls last night, and it was so much fun.  I sat between my Cove/Solivita friends, Barb W and Alice M.  They are new to G and D, but they are very good singers, so it's a pleasure to sit between them.  I also enjoyed seeing everybody who greeted me when I arrived.  It's nice to be part of this group.

water aerobics, here i come

I am up one pound today, and I'm not surprised.  We ate lunch at the Thai Blossom restaurant in Winter Garden.  I had vegetable soup and fried tofu with veggies plus rice.  It's probably sodium from all of that.  The rest of the day was very good.

Today we are eating a very fancy dinner at the fancy restaurant inside the Four Seasons hotel inside the Golden Oaks community inside WDW.  CRAZY.  Golden Oaks is gigantic multi-million dollar homes actually ON WDW property with their own shuttle busses!  So we are hobnobbing with the upper class today.

In an hour we will be leaving for water aerobics.  Then Mark is heading to his cardiology appointment while I come back home, grab a quick lunch, and go play Mah Jongg with my neighbors.  When that ends, I'll have a half hour to change clothes and head out to the dinner.

I'm hoping that eating light all day except for dinner and the water aerobics will prevent any additional weight gain by tomorrow morning.  Sigh...I knew this would be a tough week for weight loss.

BTW, the Bonnie and Clyde musical yesterday was outstanding.  I really don't understand why it only lasted 9 weeks on Broadway.

Bonnie and Clyde

Friday was so much fun!  I won two games playing Mah Jongg and loved the mani/pedi.

Yesterday it was so good to go back to SOJC.  We had not been there in close to three months, and the service was quite enjoyable.  Everybody was happy to see us back.  After services, we went to Disney Springs to get my Disney accounts straightened out. I have messed them up over the years by having two separate emails with some stuff under one and some under the other.  It took about 40 minutes, but it all got straightened out.  Then we went to Hollywood Studios to ride the Great Movie Ride and see one of the final performances of the Star Wars Stage Show.  Both were fun.  At home we had our usual Saturday dinner, talked to Evey about Disney stuff for the fall, and watched the Disney movie, Beaches, with Bette Midler.  Excellent day!

Today we are going up to Winter Garden Theater with Ed and Susie for lunch at the Thai restaurant and to see the musical Bonnie and Clyde.

Another fabulous day!

I weighed 264.3 this morning, which is a nice loss since Wednesday because I have behaved myself for a few days and walked around a lot yesterday.  Today begins the streak of one meal out for the next five days: Thai lunch today, fancy dinner at Four Seasons tomorrow night, Beef O'Brady lunch on Tuesday, lunch somewhere in Deland at a NARFE meeting on Wednesday, hibachi dinner with the Thursday Mahj group on Thursday.  If I behave the rest of the day and try to make reasonable choices in the restaurants, maybe even get a little exercise in where possible, maybe I can stay the same.  Staying the same by next Friday morning would be acceptable to me.

MANI/PEDI AT LAST!

Mark headed out at 6:45 this morning to go to the Quest at Celebration for a fasting blood sugar test.  He will see his endocrinologist next week.  So I'm home alone this morning playing on the computer, writing this blog, watching Good Morning America, and drinking coffee out of my new Lake Tahoe mug that Evey got me for my birthday.  I am almost never alone, especially over the last 64+ days!  This is a relaxing, quiet feeling.  Glad it's not every day, however, because I miss Mark already.

The good news for today is that at 11:30 both Mark and I will be in the Nature Hair salon at the Cove.   He will be getting his hair cut by Carol while I'm getting a mani/pedi and hair cut by Nicole.  In the afternoon, Mark will work in the library while I play Mah Jongg.  There might even be some time in the pool.  NONE of this has happened since mid-July so it's a BIG DEAL!

Thursday Mah Jongg

It was so much fun to get back to playing with my Thursday ladies.  There were 10 of us, and I won two games.  What a lovely bunch of women!

Then Barb and I went to the Bistro for lunch, which was great.  The flatbread pizza and salad is back plus all the decor has changed since the last time I was there.  It was delicious and beautiful.  After lunch, we came back to the house so that I could work with her on some of the Guys and Dolls songs for a little while.

We discovered that our garage door key pad no longer worked, but fortunately, Mark came home in just a few minutes to let us in.  (I still haven't gotten my house key back from the couple who collects our mail for us while on our trip.)  He tried to change the battery, but the terminal broke off and tore the wire.  Boo.

We called our handyman, Schmiddy, who sent one of his guys out immediately.  For $100 he fixed the key pad, hung the very heavy picture of Camden Yards, and cleaned out the dryer vent.  Boy, did the vent need that cleaning!  It had been over a year since we had it done.  I have been wanting the vent cleaned and the picture hung for a long time, so it was good to get it all completed this afternoon.  That was some service Schmiddy provided!

Now Mark and I can just stay home and relax the rest of the day.

Lowell and Emily gave me this jigsaw puzzle several years ago.  Once I finished it,  I had it framed at Michael's Crafts.

It looks terrific over the French doors to the lanai in the dining room.

back home and Weigh-in Wednesday

Good morning from Poinciana, FL!

We had an easy drive from Florence, SC to home yesterday with a little rain now and then but nothing that would slow us up.  We ate dinner at our own local Denny's before pulling up in our driveway at 7:30 p.m.  We unloaded the car, but we were so tired there was no unpacking or putting anything away.  Instead we just collapsed in front of the TV by 8 and sat there glued to it until 11 when we went to bed.

It was great to come home and see our house. I love our house and our community!

Today the plan is to unpack and put everything away.  Mark is also heading out around 10 this morning to do grocery shopping and pick up two months of comic books at his comic book store.  At 6:30 tonight I will head to the synagogue for the first of two choir rehearsals before the High Holidays start.  Hope those people have been practicing on their own while I've been gone.  LOL!

I am changing my official weigh-in day back to Wednesdays as of today.  I started out on Wednesdays, but somewhere along the way it changed to Mondays.  I like the alliteration of Weigh-In Wednesday, too.  So here's the report....268.5 this morning....which is three-tenths down from when we left on the trip on July 19.  Well....not the "significant weight loss" I wrote that I hoped to experience in the blog right before we left, but at least I didn't gain.  On August 17, right before we got to Evey's house, I was 261, down 7.8 pounds in that first month.  Then I started the regain process.  We ate too much during the 8 days with Evey and Eric, and once I start getting out of control, I tend to stay that way.  So, i gained that first month's weight back in the second month, and now we are home with essentially no weight loss.  Still, I'm so glad I didn't GAIN ten pounds in the two months, which I totally could have done.

Now it's Wednesday and all my meals will be at home.  There is no reason why this day won't be good, and Thursday through Saturday also involve all meals at home.  Sunday through next Thursday will have one meal out for each of those five days in a row.  Who knows what will happen then?

But at least today and through Saturday I will be eating at home and logging everything in to the Lose It! program.  With luck I can get some exercise in, too.  That was also part of the problem once we left Evey.  We really did not do much touring again combined with more sitting and more eating....not a good plan!  LOL!

Before I close for today, I will report our total mileage for the 64 day road trip....10, 043.9.  Nice.

Day 64 means we are driving home!

Today is the last day of the 9 week road trip.  It's so hard to believe.  When we were just starting out on July 19, we were wondering if we should have really planned such a monumental trip.  We love our house and community and thought why should we leave.  Well, now at the other end, we are very glad we did it.  We had great weather every day except yesterday and saw so many wonderful things and visited with so many wonderful people.

We had a miserable drive Sunday evening from Cindy's house to Ashland, VA because apparently rush hour is 24/7 around Washington, D.C.  It took well over an hour longer than the GPS predicted due to heavy volume of traffic and two accidents.  Sigh.  I'm so glad I don't live in that area and have to get on those roads every day.

Yesterday morning we got up to torrential rain in VA.  It was the first time we had any significant rain the entire trip.  We met Flyn and Jim at a Subway for lunch and had a lovely time catching up and talking for over two hours.  Unfortunately,  I forgot to take any pictures of them!  That's the second time that it happened that I was having so much fun I forgot to take pictures.  Weird.  So not like me.

We parted about 1:30 and headed for Florence, SC.  We were supposed to meet Mark and Carol for dinner, but she was sick and cancelled.  Mark and I were exhausted when we arrived at the Sleep Inn about 7 p.m. from the horrible downpours that stayed with us all day, so it's just as well we didn't socialize.  We ate subs in the room, watched some TV, and fell asleep early.

Today we plan to leave here no later than 9 a.m. and arrive in Poinciana around 6:30ish.  If all goes according to plan, we should be eating dinner in our own local Denny's tonight and sleeping in our own bed.

Wow!  What a great vacation!

Beautiful wedding of Joel and Xenia Oresky

Yesterday we picked up Lowell and Emily and headed to Rockville for the wedding of Joel Oresky and Xenia Fanola.  Needless to say, it was a truly beautiful affair full of love, family, and old friends. We had a chance to catch up with some folks we had not seen in awhile; we danced; we ate; we hugged and kissed.  What a wonderful day!

After dropping Lowell and Emily off around 4 p.m., we loaded the car, said good-bye to Cindy and Ken, and took off for Ashland, VA at 5:45.  The GPS said it was a few minutes over two hours to our Sleep Inn, and we left in the evening to avoid Monday morning rush hour through D.C.  Well, who knew there was Sunday evening rush hour???  Ridiculous.  It took three hours and fifteen minutes, and besides the irritating stop and go and 10 mph creeping from Arundel Mills Mall in Anne Arundel County all the way south through D.C., through Springfield, VA, and as far as south as Occoquan, it was also the SCARIEST drive in the last 62 days!  Ridiculous.  These people drive like maniacs.  Then there were two accidents causing massive back ups between Fredericksburg and Ashland.  Hah!  I wasn't surprised that there were accidents when people were weaving in and out at high rates of speed without giving signals, or when we would get up to about 45-50 and then come to another stop but the guy behind you doesn't want to stop or slow down.  Many times I gasped out loud because I was so sure the car behind me would hit me before he went around me, barely clearing the car in the other lane before he realized we were ALL slowing down, so he would have to slow down, too.

When we got off at our exit in Ashland, we went to the Applebee's where we immediately ordered whiskey on the rocks to calm our nerves.  I think I'll be taking the auto train from now on!

This morning we are meeting Flyn and Jim for lunch in Midlothian, VA.  Then we were supposed to meet Mark and Carol in Florence for dinner, but she is sick, so they have had to cancel that.  Tonight will be our last night in a motel, and Tuesday night we will be home in our own beds.  It's hard to believe that this odyssey is almost over.

Neil Dachis, Matt Mascone (Emily's boyfriend), Emily Dachis, Mark, Lowell, and his wife Emily.

Rabbi Saul with Emily and Lowell

The tables look beautiful.

Sara Rosen's dress was gorgeous!

Lowell and Emily waiting for the wedding to start.

Lowell always looks so handsome!

Mother of the groom, Phyllis, with her mom, Pearl, 91 and going strong.

Casey and Jen Retterer with Jen's dad, Rudy, behind them.

Zak Marsh, one of the old Mishkan Torah "kids."

Xenia going up the aisle with her parents.

Hugging her mom!

Mr. and Mrs. Joel Oresky

Xenia's sisters made these beautiful cupcakes!

Joel's sister Rachel (center) with her boyfriend Darren and cousin Susannah.

Shabbat and Mah Jongg

We spent a leisurely day on Friday hanging out with Cindy at her house except for our brief trip out to Panera's for lunch. In the evening we went to the Rosen's house for dinner.  Their son Josh and his girlfriend Emma were there, and Louis's girlfriend Brook was also there.  Louis had been in Europe and was flying back that night.  They made a wonderful dinner, and we all ate too much and enjoyed each other's company until well after 10 pm.

Today we had a lovely time at shul in the morning. Jeff Rosen was there to read his bar mitzvah portion, and Rabbi Saul read the Torah as well as shared the sermon time with Rabbi Jonathan.  We had so much fun talking to everyone and catching up with everyone.  It will be about 10 months before we are back up here, so we made the most of our time.

After shul we went to Annie's house for lunch and Mah Jongg. I won the very first game I played and then never another game, but it was still so much fun to hang out with everyone.  Arlene's three year old granddaughter Millie was there.  Wow.  That was fun.  We are rarely around three year olds anymore, and she was just delightful.

Tonight Mark made us our usual Saturday night dinner, and we are finally watching The Revenant on his tablet and checking in on the Oriole game on his iPhone.  Technology is great!

Tomorrow is the wedding of Joel and Xenia Oresky.  We will pick up Lowell and Emily to go with us.  When it's over, Mark and I are planning to head right out of Cindy's house to Ashland, VA to get a headstart on the drive home.  At the very least, it gets us out of rush hour traffic through DC on a Monday morning!  We will see Flyn and Jim for lunch and Mark and Carol for dinner.  Tuesday night we will be home.  It hardly seems real that our 64 day odyssey is almost over.

Mark admiring the Disney art at Max's kosher deli.

We satisfied our craving for fried chicken at last.

Mark and Cindy at Panera's on Friday.

Mah Jongg at Annie's house.

Friday at Cindy's

Yesterday we shopped, had a great kosher lunch at  and then had Lowell and Ken over for dinner.  Mark's Texas chili was great.  We had salad and parve cornbread plus two kinds of parve desserts.  It was all delicious.  We gave Lowell all his gifts from our trip and the ones for Emily, too.

Unfortunately, I didn't remember to take any pictures of Lowell while he was here or dinner or anything.  Soooo not like me, right?  LOL

Today we are just hanging out in the house with Cindy all day before going to the Rosens for Shabbat dinner tonight.

No pictures today.  Sorry.

Back "Home"

Last night we pulled in to Cindy's house about 9:10 p.m.  It was only the second time on this trip that we had driven so long and so far that we had to drive in the dark, but it was all on roads we knew.  Coming to the Baltimore area and specifically to Cindy's house is like coming home.  Her house and her hospitality are so wonderful that we truly feel at home here.

We left the Oresky house around 9:15 a.m. and headed to Weston, WV to visit my step-mother and my dad's grave.  After we had a nice visit with Jackie, we headed to Cumberland and paid our respects to my mother's grave before heading to Cindy's house.

Today is going to be full of shopping and some catch-up chores before hosting Lowell and Ken (Cindy's boyfriend) for a Texas chili dinner.

At my dad's grave

Great plaque of slate made for Jackie by my sister Flyn.  Ours is cowboy Mickey and Minnie!

Me and Jackie.  She looks great at 83.

Back in Maryland!

At my mother's grave in Cumberland

Youngstown and the Oreskys

On Monday we drove to the Oreskys house from Cincinnati to Boardman.  It was SO good to see them.  That evening, after a delicious hot homemade coolant dinner and salad at their house, we went to their synagogue and sat in Rabbi Saul's class on Psalm 27.  Delightful and educational at the same time.

Tuesday they both went to work all day, so Mark and I went to the Butler Museum and then Fellows Riverside Gardens before we all went to dinner at a restaurant owned by one of their synagogue's members.

This morning we will say good bye to them until Sunday when we see them at the wedding of their son Joel in Maryland.  Then we are driving to Weston, WV to visit my stepmother Jackie and my Dad's grave.  Afterwards we are driving to Cumberland, MD to visit my mother's grave and end up at my sister Cindy's house sometime after dinner.

Another great day on the road.

At a rest stop in Ohio Mark pointed out that Ohio is the only state with a flag in a pennant shape.

YAY!  Saul and Phyllis!

We brought them a box of buckeyes from a local gourmet candy shop.  Peanut butter covered in chocolate.  Yum.

Rabbi Saul in his office.

Rabbi Saul teaching his class.

Going in to the Butler Museum

Yes, this guy fooled me.  I asked him if I could take photos!  LOL

Norman Rockwell painting of Lincoln.  Very nice.

Mark and Casey Stengel

A mirror piece of art....super fun.

Mark in the Western Art section, always a favorite.

The Butler is right next to the campus.

Our next stop

Overlooking the Mahoning River

Enjoying the lovely weather

This restaurant was great and owned by one of Saul's synagogue members.

Dinner o the outdoor patio was delightful.