Foamee Offers Coffee, originally uploaded by criana.

Very excited to be able to offer coffees via Foamee. Most of my friends and I drink more coffee than beer so this is great!

As most know, I need to lose weight and have been intermittently working on it for a while. I’ve recently started working with a nutritionist. Craig is seeing an integrative medicine doctor, who has prescribed a gluten-free diet for a month to clear his system. I’ve also been following James‘ progress over FIT, it helps keep me motivated.

I also saw my OBGYN two weeks ago. I asked her about Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, since there are quite a few of the symptoms I’ve had over my life. Some of the symptoms have gone away while others are minor in my life still. If I do have PCOS, it could explain a lot, and could also cause problems when we try to have children. I need to go have a simple blood test done to find out, which I have the paper work for.

While there I also asked her about my weight over the years. I started seeing her when I was 14, because my period came every 2 weeks for a month and half and then stopped coming for almost 3 months. They had all my paper work back to the beginning.

• 135 lbs at 14 yo
• 157 lbs at 15 yo
• 187 lbs at 19 yo

I was pretty shocked to see I had gained over 20 lbs in a year! I don’t remember much from back then, a lot was going on. I do remember my weight from 19 on.

• 173 lbs at 20 yo
• 192 lbs at 21 yo
• 205 lbs at 22 yo
• 211-215 lbs at 28 yo

I’m trying to look back now and see where things went wrong, or went right. The drop at 20 years old, I was really happy doing seminars, taking classes, exercising with Craig that summer. Then my Dad passed away and I stopped eating, again dropping weight. But a few weeks later I started at a new college, where I dormed, was massively stressed out, and didn’t think, pizza or salad, I choose pizza, chinese take out, subway, and anything else that came in the form of take out.

I’m still trying to get past being angry that I’m even here or dealing with this. Which I know is stupid and I really need to accept it, move on and start making change. Also trying to be patient, which is something I have never been very good at. I want it and I want it now. Yah I was a brat as a kid.

From the Secret and CorrieHaffly’s blog, I need to start a gratitude journal and start appreciating and accepting where I’m at, the positives that are here. I have the knowledge, a gym membership around the corner from our home, a husband who wants to eat healthy too, family that’s supportive, a job with no cafeteria to tempt or vending machines.

I wonder if I can program a “You Can Do It, Believe In Yourself” to pop up on my screen every few hours.

Back to journaling my food, making it to the gym at least 3 times a week, drinking more fluids and being positive

The road less traveled, originally uploaded by criana.

We took our second annual winter walk in Steep Rock park this past Saturday morning. We’re enjoying making this a tradition, after the walk we go to GW Tavern and have brunch, while warming up by the fireplace.

We had a special treat of a fresh blanket of snow on the ground. To view more photos, visit Flickr

Today launches the Email Standards Project. I can not begin to convey the importance of this project. To help relate why this is so important, I’m going to give you some background on how I ended up designing emails for a living and a typical day.

Background
I started designing websites in 1997. It was at an internship while in high school. My goal was to go to college and get a degree in Graphic Design. I did go off to college and have my degree in Graphic Design. While at that internship I made a significant switch from the world of print which I started learning to digital. After college I continued to work designing websites.

In late August 2007 I was introduced to the world of email design. The company I was employed with decided to get into email marketing. It was there that I learned I’d have to step back to 1997 in terms of markup for my HTML. Marking the first frustration.

A Typical Day
I get a project, that a company wants to send out an email to their customers. It’s best when I am able to design the piece from scratch but many times I get “suggestions” or the actual photoshop file handed to me to “make work”. From here I deconstruct the PSD file, or work off my own, and make precise cuts and determine what can be actual text and what will not be guaranteed to translate over correctly in all email clients.

I then go into Dreamweaver and layout my HTML file with CSS. After it’s displaying correctly as a webpage, I then change over all my CSS to inline CSS. For “padding”, many times I need to use transparent spacer.gif files, even more so when dealing with Lotus Notes which does not render any padding/margins what-so-ever.

After all the CSS has been placed inline and no shorthand. I copy it over to our system, upload all the images, make sure the images have full paths and start testing.

This is the “fun” part. Every email client wants to render things differently. I also have to plan ahead for the end user having turned off images.

Apple Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird are hands down the best at truly rendering things as you think they should look. Lotus Notes is hands down the worst.

So in a nutshell this is why E-Mail Standards are so important. Head over to http://www.email-standards.org to learn more, join up and help support a very worthy cause!

My very first MeToday. Craig and I took a walk in White Memorial Park this morning.
Pics from today Flickr White Memorial Set

Ordered one of these from B&H Photo and Video earlier today. I was going to go through Amazon, but I want to guarantee I receive it before Thanksgiving. That’s a whole other story of how Amazon has screwed up our shipping multiple times.

After listening to the Talk Show episode 4 and coming across several posts in my Google Reader feeds about getting a fixed lense, I took the leap. The price is definitely in our budget. I’m really looking forward to going out and taking some photos.

We’ve been using iSale since November 2006. It’s been a pretty good program making eBay listing much less of a pain. Since we purchased it for $40.00. Then an update came out in February, which we upgraded at $16.00. And now it’s November and another upgrade for $20.00.

While I like the app, if I were to upgrade again, I will have spent $76.00 on the program. Nothing says I have to upgrade, but there’s something to be said for companies that offer free upgrades for at least a year from your purchase.

Tonight I went and met with my trainer. We did a slightly different work out from the last time. This time we focused more on my upper body.

• 10 minutes on elliptical
• 5 minutes on the track
• upper body free weights, 4lb weights
• machine upper body workout
• stair case x3
• upper body free weights, 4lb weights
• machine upper body workout
• crunches, sets of 15 and 20 x2
• reverse crunches set of 10 x4
• 15 minutes on crossramp

It was an intense but good work out for an hour. I’m amazed at how much clearer I feel and think afterwards. Now I just need a kick in the ass to go more regularly.

For me I keep waiting for Craig to get me motivated but right now I think it’s going to need to be the other way around.

I’m hoping next week to try skiing again and get some hiking in.

Spaces @ Work, originally uploaded by criana.

I love the new Spaces feature in Leopard, aka Apple OS 10.5.

1) Lotus Notes
2) VMWare Fusion
3) iTunes
4) Apple Mail, Safari and iChat

I’ve gotten pretty quick with using the keyboard shortcuts to jump around screen.

[Update: I stopped using Spaces while at work, it became more of a pain to remember which window had what folder view open and having to move back and forth. I might revisit this in the future with a more concrete plan for each space]