Celebrity Summit, here we come!

We had a great visit with Vinnie and Annette, dinner at a diner where we all chose to have breakfast for dinner, and then dancing at the masquerade party. It was fun dancing the Electric Slide and the Cuban Shuffle because those always seem to be part of Sail-a-way parties.  We got to practice them last night. We also danced one slow dance and four other fast dances, so I felt like I burned off all those home fries from dinner!

By 10:15 we were checked in to the Comfort Suites in East Brunswick, NJ.

We just finished having breakfast, and now we are back in the hotel room putting the finishing touches on our packing.  Mark is davening while I'm writing this blog.

Soon we are driving over to Leslie's house, which isn't far from here, maybe 10 minutes away.  She's going to let us leave our car parked in front of her house and drive us to the port.  According to Mapquest it's only 36 minutes up to the port from her house.  By 12:30 we hope to be eating lunch in the buffet of the Celebrity Summit.

I've been excited about this cruise for days, but finally last night, after getting into the hotel room, Mark said, "Well, I'm finally starting to get excited for this cruise."  Yay!  Now we are both excited for the cruise.

Heading to NJ

In an hour or so, we will head north to NJ.  We are having some socializing time in the home of our friends, Vinnie and Annette, then an early bird dinner, compliments of Vinnie, followed by a masquerade dance party at their clubhouse, before checking into the Comfort Inn near the Gaertner's house.  It should be a great day.

Since this is a masquerade dance, Annette said wear a mask but no costume. I brought a cat mask from home that used to be Evey's and Mark bought a Zorro/Lone Ranger type mask yesterday at Walmart.  While we were at Walmart, we tried on some Halloween masks.  Those pictures are below and were pretty funny looking.

Cindy got home about 3:30 yesterday, so we had a lovely time catching up on everything.  It surely wasn't enough time, since we had to leave at 4:45, but we'll see her again on the 21st after the cruise. Then she'll be here every day that we are.  Yay!  I love Cindy SO MUCH!

Dinner at Lowell and Emily's house was awesome.  The food was good, too good. I ate too much.  I am so predictable.  I ate exactly what I said I would with a few exceptions.  First, he offered to make special cocktails that he had invented called a Solstice.  It was a form of Cosmo, which he knows I like.  How could I insult him by turning this down?  It was delicious, so three of us had one, and he had Jameson's Irish Whiskey for his dad.  So thoughtful.  We checked out their new gorgeous, gigantic, recliner couch in their basement and how they have fixed up and beautified their little backyard.  Their house looks beautiful.  We had fun playing with Ozma and gave her a squeaky hedgehog like Kiwi's.  I ate what I planned for dinner, but I ate at least twice as much challah as I programmed, and before I ate any meat, I used some of the Kerrygold reduced fat butter on half of the challah.  Delicious.  Then Emily had thoughtfully purchased a sugar free Angel food cake for dessert, an excellent choice, but calories I had not programmed either.  When I got home, I needed some food to take my night time Advil with, so I had two Oreos.  All in all, I think I had about 1900 calories, which is 500 over my daily limit.   That should not be enough to gain weight. It should be a nice maintenance number.

My weight this morning was up only half a pound to 261.5, which could just be sodium from the deli wrap or hidden salt on the chicken cutlet that was cooked in the store.  It's hard to say.  Anyway this is the last morning that I will weigh in until October 22 after the cruise.  It just so easy for me to gain weight when I'm actually trying not to but when I'm not in the house.  I would be grateful to come back from the cruise not higher than 262!  That's for sure!

Enjoy these pictures from yesterday. I have decided to take the computer, and if I can post a blog along the way on the cruise, I certainly will. I might even have time to post one tomorrow with pictures from today with Vinnie and Annette.

Good morning, Baltimore!

We had a very lovely train ride up on Wednesday.  Everything was so smooth, and we came in ahead of schedule.  We even had a a bonus feature because when we got to the train station our friends Ralph and Phyllis Mollerick were there.  We spent the hour or so waiting to board having a fun time chatting with them.  We said our good-byes when it was time to board and went to our sleeper car.  It was a smooth train ride, great dinner.  We slept well.  I ate what I was supposed to.

The train arrived early yesterday morning. and even though our car came out as one of the final ten, it was only 9:15 a.m.  We did a little shopping at the Shopper's Food Warehouse across from the train and the kosher grocery store in Silver Spring then pulled into Cindy's driveway at 12:15.  That was the earliest we ever got to Cindy's house.  So very, very nice.

At that point we just jumped in to unpacking, eating lunch, paying bills, balancing checkbooks, taking naps, and generally getting all settled in.  Cindy's house is surely our home away from home, or as she said to us last week in an email "mi casa es su casa." She's not even here as she's visiting Jackie in WV right now.

Today we are doing a little Walmart run after breakfast and a few more little chores in the house.  With any luck, Cindy will return in the afternoon from her trip out to WV in time to see us before we head over to Lowell and Emily's house for dinner.  She will be gone again to Ken's house for the weekend before we get back from dinner. We won't see her again until we return from the cruise, so we might miss her until the 21st if she doesn't make it back by 5 p.m. today.  We are hoping she can make it back in time.

I did pack my scale, but I'm not happy with what I saw.  Last Friday I reported 260, a very happy five pounds down.  Then I reported every blog that I was holding steady on a plateau.  Actually I didn't write  down the fact that Wednesday morning before heading out to the train, I was down one to 259, so being 261 this morning is extra frustrating.  But there it is anyway.  My weight this morning is 261, an official gain of one pound for the week.

As an average, though, last week I lost five, then gained one this week, so I have averaged a two pound loss for the past two weeks.  Any weight loss group support system like Weight Watchers would be cheering me on. So I'm trying to cheer myself on.  Yay me.

The mentally sick me who does not have a normal relationship with food or weight is sitting here getting depressed over tracking every calorie, eating the exact amount allowed on my LoseIt app, and gaining two pounds in two days.  I just shouted and raged at Mark, who is not the source of my rage but takes it well anyway, that if I'm going to gain weight I'd just as soon do it by eating a big bag of Doritos and have a good time.  lol  Just joking.  Maybe tomorrow morning the pounds will be gone.  It might be the sodium from the Bacos on my salad last night.  I haven't had any Bacos in a long while.

Tonight we agreed with Lowell and Emily to make Shabbat dinner a healthy one.  We bought what looks to be very healthy, very bland chicken breast cutlets with no sauce or breading or anything.  Each cutlet is about 4 ounces.  We also bought something called a deli wrap that looked like a pastry roll up filled with corned beef and pastrami. It's one piece about four inches long by three inches wide that we will slice so that each of us gets about a one inch piece in in depth and about three inches wide.  That's a big unknown in calories.  We will have that with a roasted green veggie that Emily is making although they are using olive oil on it.  There will be wine and challah and no dessert.  I can make that meal work by taking only a small amount of challah like I do at home and not drinking more than a few ounces of the wine.  Unfortunately, they bought a bottle of a sweet white wine at a local MD winery that they are sure I'm going to love just for me to enjoy tonight, so it's going to be hard not to have a full glass to show my appreciation.  Usually I take two ounces of wine on Shabbat.  Tonight I'm going to program four to five ounces. Also that pastrami roll up thing is a huge unknown that will be impossible to guess and full of sodium, but my breakfast and lunch will be at home, very low calories, so I hope things will be ok.  Of course, that's what I thought about the lemon pepper cod on the train and look where I am this morning

So that's where I am and how things are going.  I haven't decided yet about taking the computer on the cruise.  Internet is very expensive on Celebrity cruises.  We have only 90 minutes each for free, and I don't know if I'll use it for blogging.  We shall see what mood I'm in tomorrow morning when we head up to NJ.  Sunday is the day we get on the ship. I'm getting very excited.

Simchat Torah amazement

Last night we saw such an amazing thing!  They unrolled the entire Torah around the social hall at SOJC.  It made big, loose, square around that huge room.  One person held the roller from Genesis and stood still as they unrolled it. It pretty much reached all the way back to that person when it ended, and then another person stood there holding the wooden roller at the end of Deuteronomy.  All along the way,  the congregants were given two paper towels to hold it up gently from the top.  The rabbi, cantor and all those who were going to read from it, and small children were on the inside.  Everyone holding it up with paper towels were mostly shoulder to shoulder on the outside of the circle.  Three or four people were farther outside because they did not want to participate for whatever reason.  Mark was one of those.  I thought that was sad because it was an amazing sight and feeling standing there holding it and watching everyone locate their reading and then reading.

The rabbi did a "Torah Tour."  He read the first sentence to kick it off. Then various people read a sentence on the way around the circle, and the rabbi translated it and put it into context.  The sentences were chosen well, I thought, to tell the story.  Eventually the last sentence was read.  It was an amazing way to celebrate the Torah on Simchat Torah.  Evidently our previous rabbi started this just a couple of years ago, but we had not gone to the night time service here in Florida before. In addition to this amazing site, they also did the seven Hakafot with lots of lively singing and dancing.  There were tons of enthusiastic kids and teens.  There was the whole usual evening service, three aliyahs read from the Torah, and a Sundae bar at the end.  I did NOT make a sundae.  It was a lot of fun.

Today we are not going to the morning services because we just have too much to do in order to head out tomorrow morning by 10 a.m.  Last night I made a To Do list for today and tomorrow and it ran two pages.  I have to get started.  Mark's list includes taking the succah down.  Mine includes going out to get a flu shot because I think it would be better to have it now than to get on a cruise ship in October full of over two thousand people without it.  lol

Meanwhile my plateau continues. I'm 259.8 again this morning after eating 1305 calories yesterday.

I will be taking my laptop with me on the trip, but there will no blogs for the two weeks while we are on the ship.  I won't write one tomorrow morning, but I can write one Thursday afternoon from Cindy's house.

Some interesting odds and ends

Yesterday we bought two new shower heads and two new pieces of luggage.  I chose a 25 inch soft side spinner bag; Mark chose a 24 inch.  We had read that in Japan no one uses large bags, and taxis and buses are not prepared to handle large ones.  In fact, people will stare at those with large bags.  Also on our China Eastern flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai the checked bag weight limit is only 40 pounds, not 50 like on US domestic flights.  We have gigantic bags and regularly are very close to the 50 pound limit. I'm a terrible packer, always taking things I never wear.  

So we decided we need smaller bags and need to pack lighter and smarter.  We are going to use this Canadian cruise to practice for the Asian trip.  We shall see if it works!

Picking new shower heads is harder than it sounds.  We have had some horrible ones in hotels.  I tried to read reviews, but I didn't want to go to stores like Bed, Bath, and Beyond that are far away yesterday.  I didn't have time to order online.  So we only wanted to get what Walmart had, which wasn't much of a choice.  We finally chose a Waterpik PowerSpray+ with a 5 foot hose.  I don't think a 5 foot hose would be long enough if I really had to be seated on our bench after surgery or if I was infirm, but fortunately that is not now the case.  It looks reasonable, so we shall give it a try.  Abdul will install it when we are gone. I hope it's better than what we have now.

We will be going to shul this morning soon.  Mark is reading haftarah.  There's Yizkor to say, and we change from praying for dew to praying for rain.  That's always interesting.  Then this evening we will pick Jonathan and Susan up at 5:30 up and go back for the evening Simchat Torah services.  SOJC does a very interesting thing, which we've never seen.  I'll write about it tomorrow.  They also do a  make-your-own-sundae bar, which I plan to avoid entirely.  All of that will be for tomorrow's blog.

Finally, there's my weight plateau.  Oh, yeah, I've hit my first plateau since Memorial Day. I called it Friday because I had dropped five pounds in one week.  Here is how the last four mornings have gone.

Friday, 260 after eating 1100 calories Thursday

Saturday, 259.8 after eating 1315 calories Friday

Sunday, 260 after eating 1387 calories Saturday

Monday, 260.4 after eating 1375 calories Sunday

So except for last Thursday when for some reason I was significantly under the limit, I had a good amount of calories each day, I have just hung right around the 260 mark.  That's a plateau.  At this point in my weight loss, I am probably going to have to get more serious about adding in some aerobic exercise like walking.  The good news is that my joints aren't hurting and neither are Mark's.  In fact, this morning Mark's leg looks normal.  No swelling at all, and he says no pain.  He's planning to go without the compression stocking today for the first time in over a week.  So we both feel like walking can come back into our lives.  Haha.  Probably not today or the next few days because we are just too overbooked, but definitely on the cruise and on our shore excursions.