Four More Weird Things

Aggiejenn at Reflecting Him tagged me to write about six weird things about myself and so I decided that rather than ignore her tag because I'd already done 6 weird things, that I would just do a twist on the meme. I really wanted to "honor" her tag, especially since it's the first time I've specifically been tagged by someone! Woo-hoo! Soooooo, without further ado, here are 4 weird things about places we've lived because this post was getting entirely too long to do 6. (I must add that the apartment we're in now is the 11th place we've lived in almost 10 years so now I've got to figure out which 4 to write about. Decisions, decisions.)

1. Our first apartment was in a somewhat-seedy part of town and we had some interesting things happen while we were there, and now that I think about it, they all happened in the middle of the night.

• People would knock on our door at 2:00 am asking for cigarettes.
• A woman knocked on our door after being attacked by her boyfriend. She ran away before we could help her and we later found out she wasn't badly hurt and got help from the police soon after that.
  
• A drunk guy drove into our parking lot to drop someone off and then passed out with his car running. We had to call the police to come and get him (at first, I thought he was dead). The first thing the guy did when he "came to" was flip off the police. Very couth.

2. Our fourth house was a parsonage (preacher's house) in a small town that had one stop light. Before we moved in, they told us we could paint the interior any color we wanted. Big mistake. I chose a bright blue for the living room and a bright yellow for the kitchen. The kitchen wasn't so bad, but what in the world was I thinking with the bright blue? When we moved out, it took the youth group many coats of paint to "undo" our artwork.

3. In this same small one-stoplight-town we did actually have our own grocery store. We did not shop there long, however, because one day I witnessed something which deeply disturbed me. As I walked past the meat department, I saw that the butcher was actually cutting meat and smoking at the same time. And the cigarette had burned waaaaaaaay down and he had not "tapped the ashes off" of the end of the cigarette. (Sorry, never been a smoker so I don't know the lingo.) Basically, picture a man bent over a bunch of uncovered meat with these ashes dangling dangerously from his mouth. Needless to say, I started driving to a neighboring town about 30 miles away for most of our groceries after that.

4. When we lived in Maryland in house number 6, we very nearly burned our house down. On one quiet night at home, we decided to start a nice fire in the fireplace and cuddle up on the couch. JJ decided that he wanted to burn a pizza box and when he put it in, he accidentally knocked the flu closed. Flames started shooting out the front of the fireplace and licking the mantle. We frantically looked around for a way to put the fire out. JJ found a tupperware container full of water in the kitchen sink and ran with it to put the fire out. The trouble is, the water sloshed on the floor and he slipped and fell. He slid straight into the coat closet. By the time he got up and ran to the fireplace with what little water he had left, the box had burned up and the crises was over. Thankfully, there was not much damage done and now we are just left with a really funny story!

Now for an update on the whole weightloss thing. I've been remiss in my posting this week because I've been preparing for an out of town guest (woo-hoo!). So here's the whole scoop on the progress towards my goal.

My short-term goal is to lose 10 lbs. in 5 weeks, which would be next Friday. It looks like I will not meet my goal at this point, but this goal has served its purpose. You see, my total weightloss goal is 74.6 lbs. At first, when JJ set a temporary goal for himself I kind of wondered what the point was, but now that I've done the same (with some encouragement from Heather at One Woman's World) I see the value of it. I was losing at a rate of about 1.5 lbs a week and I set this goal to lose 2 lbs. a week so it would motivate me to exercise and it's done just that. But I wonder also if this has kept me from losing the weight because I'm building muscle. That's what I prefer to tell myself anyway.

So here's the "skinny" (pun intended). I have lost a total of 20.2 lbs and a total of 17" (adding up the # of inches I've lost from my bust, waist, hips and thighs). So even if I do not lose the 10 lbs. by next Friday, I have still "won". How can losing 20 lbs. be a bad thing? !!!!!!!!!!! I refuse to be discouraged about it!!!!!!! Yay me!!!!!!!!!!!