monday mix tape

i made you a mix tape of all my favorites this week!

from the "I-can't-believe-I'm-blogging-about-this" file:
I mentioned last Monday that I've begun a self-improvement project called Hunting for the hidden Tamara underneath all that stuff. (In other words, eating healthy, watching calories, exercising, and, basically, giving a damn.) So, I thought to myself, why not let my weekly mix post include a litle bit of an update? Want to play along? Since the title I've given the self-improvement project seems to be working-overly-hard-to-avoid-cliche as well as being, well, just plain stupid, I'll mail a bag of soy nuts to anyone who can come up with something better.

So at Week Three I've stuck to my eating plan with only three somewhat-intentionally-scheduled food splurges. I've lost six pounds and stayed faithful to three to four workouts a week. I say stayed -- as in the past tense --because this past week I hit my first major discouragement. I developed what we're guessing to be a stress fracture at the tippy-top of my right foot. Just below the second toe. It hurt like the devil and I had to keep it elevated and iced for a whole day and then hobbled around the rest of the week.

My friend Earl, unwittingly crashed my self-pity party, by describing a stress fracture as a sort of panic attack for the bones. This totally helped me get it. Also it totally ticked me off. This means that my feet are so used to freeloading that when they figured out I was serious about this whole thing they staged a revolt. I threw a good old-fashioned tantrum including greeting my husband the moment he got home from work with the simultanous one-two punch of sobby tears and a plea for Outback takeout.

I read this post from The Pile I'm Standing In today and it describes me perfectly. That's good truth right there.

Another link I loved this week was from Lindsay at A is for Arrow. I absolutely adore this post -- especially her illustration -- and am seriously considering a haiku in honor of my slipper socks.

In the meantime I'm pretty excited about a couple of books that came in the mail this week, but you'll have to wait until next Monday to hear more. I need to get to sleep so I can drag these sulking feet back to the gym tomorrow morning.

One of Lindsay's self-illustrated New Year Resolutions.