RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1)  You know, I can't believe that it's been so long since I've written anything on here.  My blog has always been a fun thing for me to do, but these days I never seem to have the time or energy!  That kind of sucks.  Anyways, I have no intention of stopping, but I hope you lovely people don't give up on me.  My life is just kind of boring right now.

2) Well, I made it through my first round of preparing taxes for the church workers!  Yippee!  Actually, make that a hesitant yippee, because I have no idea if I'm going to get a sternly worded letter from the IRS telling me that everything is wrong and I'm going to be arrested for tax fraud or something.  Since the church is a tax-free organization, all I really had to do was prepare income tax stuff (1099 & W2 forms) for the church employees, and that wasn't super hard or anything, but it was nerve wracking. I had to use a typewriter, y'all.  I might as well have been chipping the darn forms on pieces of slate. I type fast on a computer, but it took hours for me to do the forms because I didn't have spell check or any way to erase what I'd typed if I screwed anything up.  Yes, you can do all of your tax forms online, or at least with software, but the church can't afford to upgrade our Quickbooks so that we can automatically print the tax stuff.  People get very weird about their money, and rightly so, but being the one responsible for making sure it's right is awful.

I also had to make sure the church contribution letters were done, and that was another kind of pain in the ass.  If you aren't familiar with what contribution letters are, they are detailed reports of the offerings that are given to the church so that people can get tax deductions.  Some people don't bother using them, but some people are meticulous and they want every penny they give to be counted.  Of course, since I wasn't the only one working with the records this past year, and since a new program had been used (on a separate computer and the files hadn't been transferred) there were a lot of mistakes.  I had to manually, and individually, type in dozens (possibly hundreds) of new entries because our pastor didn't want anyone to get sheets from two different programs.  The work was tedious and sometimes confusing, so I have spent the last week or so correcting people's letters if they needed them corrected.  Fun stuff, you guys.

3) So I'm still trying to do the weight loss thing, and I still hate it.  Actually, I haven't been as careful as I was before because I think I've lost my mojo.  For one, I had a specific date and event to work towards back in October.  Having a goal date with a planned event made it easier to work towards losing weight.  For two... wait, is that even a thing? Secondly?  Is that better?  Secondly, the holidays happened and all of that lovely food was around and I didn't want it to go to waste. :)  For three...I don't have as much time to devote to going to the gym as I had before.  I've been trying to get back into the groove, but now that I'm working, it's more difficult to get to the gym because I either have to go really early, or after work, and I'm always too tired after work.  It's very frustrating.  I know this is a stupid thing to say, but I'd almost rather be able to focus on losing weight than working.  That is probably vain, and I'm sorry for that, but damnit, it was working!!!! 

I wasn't going to say how much I'd lost because it felt like I was jinxing myself, but at this point it doesn't matter. To date I've lost 35 pounds, and now I'm stuck.  I'd lost 37, but the last two pounds keep on coming back, going away, & coming back again.  After steadily losing weight (albeit slowly, but that works for me) for so long, being stuck is really frustrating.  Keep your fingers crossed for me, guys, because I've got a goal and I want to reach it. I just need my mojo back. Send me vibes.

BTW, 35 pounds probably sounds like a lot, but I'll be darned if I can tell where it came from.  Seriously, I see those commercials where people are all "I lost X amount of pounds by using this diet!" and they have the before and after pictures where they look so drastically different, but I don't think I look that different.  I mean, I can kind of see it, but mostly I think I must have lost it all from my head or some other useless place.  Maybe other people can tell, but I can't.

4) The other day I tried a drink that was so weird that I need everyone to go out and get it because I don't want to be the only one.  I wrote about it on my other blog, so you'll have to go there to read about it.  Mamma Chia...the slimiest drink on earth!