These past few days have been a whirlwind.  Several going away parties, meeting with friends in various countries, and trying to get our air shipment out of the way all led to me being downright exhausted (but that’s to be expected).  Jamie’s been sick, so that’s not helping matters either, though it appears he’s in the upswing of things.  

Last Friday, the air shipment left.  We now only have the things which will fit in two suitcases, and the cat.  Today has been spent cleaning as and the beginning stages of packing (and wondering how the hell we’re going to get all this stuff back home…some of it is getting left here, there’s just no way around it).  Yesterday, we drove to Luxembourg to say a final goodbye to my birthday twin, good friend Nicola…and to meet her new son, Charly!  I got to give him his baby blanket which I finished crocheting just the other evening, and we got to have lunch and spend time together for a bit before Jamie and I drove back to the NL.  Later today, we’re heading over to a friend’s place for dinner and spending time with them…they’re one of our closest friends here.  (And I just realized, after reading this paragraph, that it is disjointed and the timing is all back and forth…my apologies, and yet, I’m too lazy to go back and correct it.  That’s what you get for an iPad post.)

Tomorrow is the vet appointment, where we get a signed off paperwork saying Lily isn’t diseased, rabied, and/or dying.  Should be fairly cut and dried…her pet passport is up to date with all her immunizations, so customs in the US should be straightforward (god please, PLEASE, let it be straightforward).  Tuesday, we go to the town hall to de-register, come back and turn in our apartment, then head up to my friend, Tupp’s, house to say goodbye there.  She’s my best friend here, it’ll be hard to say goodbye to her.  If she were only a few states over, that would be one thing…a totally do-able distance.  But overseas?  That requires a fair amount of logistics (and money) to see each other.  Thank god for Skype and FB chats…we’ll survive, but it’ll suck.

Then…after visiting Tupp, we drive over to Amsterdam and check into our hotel for the evening.  Wednesday morning we need to be at the airport around 8:00am, so we’re staying the night in a hotel (plus, we won’t have an apartment, since we had to turn the keys in).  Finding a pet friendly airport took a little finagling, but it’s sorted now, and Jamie and I will have an evening of just pure relaxation, room service, and watching TV.  

 That’s it for now…I’m sure I’ll post more soon!   Hope you all had a great weekend!

XOXOXO,
K.

I figured I might as well blog about my last day of the Sport Fasting experience!  Day 10 came and went, nothing overwhelming.  By that point, I was eating full meals and doing just fine…feeling fantastic, actually!  Overall, I lost 11 pounds, and am really happy with the results!  I have only a few days left at the gym, as we leave on Tuesday for Amsterdam (fly out Wednesday morning), but I’ll be joining a gym back home the day after we return, so I plan on staying in the workout groove.  Hopefully I can keep the momentum on weight loss and continue to gain muscle!

XOXOXO,
K.

Today marks Day 9 of the Sports Fasting program…only tomorrow left and then it’s (somewhat) back to normal!  I have to say, even though I was skeptical at first, I’ve been very pleased with the program and my results.  I didn’t lose any more weight between yesterday and today, so it appears I’ve started to plateau.  I’m actually somewhat happy about that, because I’m always nervous of such a large weight loss in a short period of time.  I think I’ll end up around 11 pounds down from where I started, which is awesome!  I can definitely tell in the way my clothes fit, and my energy levels.  Now, just need to maintain this loss and work on being healthy/losing more at a slower pace!

XOXOXO,
K.

Holy crap, I can’t believe that we are a mere 9 days away from moving home!  The movers come one last time on Friday to pick up the stuff for the boat shipment, and in the meantime, Jamie and I are in the midst of making a list of all the things that we want to sell/get rid of here.  We have things like an electric grill, appliances for the kitchen, an extra fridge, an oven, etc.  We’re not planning on taking any of it with us (wrong plugs and different volts/watts than US plug-ins), so we need to ditch it here in Europe. 

This week is going to absolutely fly by.  We have going away parties Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings, then we’re going to visit a friend in Luxembourg on Saturday.  Sunday will probably be spent either a) slothing around or b) visiting my friend up north.  Then Monday, we take Lily to the vet for her last check-up, Tuesday we do the apartment inspection and give up the keys, and then drive to Amsterdam to stay in a hotel overnight, before flying out Wednesday morning!  I can’t believe this time is finally here…it’s so surreal.  I don’t really think it’s sunk in yet…and probably won’t until I’ve been in the US for three weeks or so, wondering when I’ll be going back “home” to the NL…then realizing that it’s not home anymore.  I’ve spoken with some other people who have done this, and all of them have agreed that the repatriation process is even harder than the expatriation process…so I’m not entirely sure what to expect.  Hopefully, it’ll go relatively smoothly.  I feel as though I’m a fairly laid back person when it comes to these moves, and I tend to adapt quickly, so hopefully it won’t be a big deal.  If it is?  Well, I have my therapist on speed dial.

I’m also in the midst of Day 8 in the Sport Fasting program.  Yesterday was my first “Build Up” day after the three day fast, and also my first day of solid food after four days of a liquid diet.  The weekend went fine…it was a bit harder to fast with Jamie home, because I was making him meals and such, but honestly it wasn’t that bad.  The day back on solid food, he just ate what I did, so no big deal there.  I had some trouble digesting the protein at dinner (chicken breast), so hopefully tonight’s dinner of fish will be a bit better.  I also went to the gym and weighed today…down 5.1 kgs (11.2 pounds)!!!  I’m so thrilled!!  I really hope I can maintain and continue to lose, though obviously not at the rate I’ve been losing now.  I’m only a few months away from Hawaii and would really like my body to look nice (though no one looks nice in a wetsuit, let’s be honest).  I’m still working out daily, though that will probably go back to 5-6 times a week once I’m finished with the program, as well.

That’s about it right now.  Things are crazy, but I’m excited!  Hope you all had a great weekend!

XOXOXO,
K.

Today is day 5 of the Sport Fasting program…halfway there!  It’s also my second day of fasting, with tomorrow being my last day.  After that, I start building back up in food intake…can’t wait!  I’m still not hungry, but damn do I miss eating.

Another day at the gym, down another half kg (around a pound), and back at work.  After the gym, I picked Jamie up from the train station…he’s finally home!  I’m so glad he’s back, it was a long three weeks with him being gone!

Not a lot else going on.  I’m glad today is Friday, I could use a nice, relaxing weekend with Jamie where we just sort of hang out and veg.  Hope you all are doing well!

XOXOXO,
K.

Today is my first, real, day of “fasting” on this program.  I guess it isn’t really a fast, per se, because I do ingest liquids…150ml of fruit juice for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Still not hungry, so the supplements are doing their job.  I do miss actually eating, though.  I’m down 3.6 kg (~8 pounds) and feel really good!  I still have tons of energy and am working out every morning still (around 45 minutes of cardio).  I’m proud of myself for sticking with this so far!  Only 6 more days to go…and only 2 more fasting days after today.  I think it’ll be harder tomorrow and Saturday, because Jamie will be here.

Which brings me to another point…Jamie comes home tomorrow!!!  I am so excited to have him back here…he’s been gone nearly 3 weeks in the US, getting things ready for us there.  I am so lucky to have such an amazing husband…he’s been working himself crazy, getting the house cleaned and ready, working, traveling for work, and other things.  He’s so good to me!  When we move home, our house will be deep cleaned (thanks to him and his mom), the minor repairs will be complete, the house will have all new locks on the external doors, and the majority of the upstairs will be professionally painted.  Yeah, I’m lucky…I know it.

That’s about it for now!  Work is going well…I’ve applied for a few more jobs and had someone back home ask for my resume, so maybe something will come of that.  I’m done worrying about it for now.  I have my temporary (6 month) contract ready to go for the same job as I’m doing now, only in the States, so I have that to keep me going for at least 6 months.  Plus, I got a raise as a contractor!  So…yeah, nothing to worry about at the moment, which is good.

Hope you all have a good day!

XOXOXO,
K.

Well…I’m almost to lunch of day 3 of the Sport Fasting program.  Honestly, it is amazing to me how I’m not really hungry!  I thought I’d be starving through this program, but I’m really not.  My trainer kept reassuring me that the proteins and amino acids in the powder mix I drink three times a day helps with hunger, but I didn’t really believe him.  Guess he wasn’t lying!

Today is the beginning of a liquid diet.  I get 300ml of fruit juice for breakfast and lunch, then 550ml of vegetable juice for dinner.  I’m really lucky because the grocery chain here (Albert Heijn) has some amazing fresh squeezed juice combinations in their produce section, so I have a lot of options for juice and flavor.  I’m currently working my way through an orange/strawberry mix, and picked up an apple/mango mix as well.  TASTY!  It’s odd, because I don’t really drink any juice normally…too high in sugar, and a lot of times all the acid does a number on my stomach, but I seem to be doing well so far.  After today, and then three days of “fasting” with very minimal intake (juice three times daily, in small amounts), I might feel differently and never want to see juice again. 

I swore I wasn’t going to weigh until this was all over, but when I got to the gym this morning (the program still has me working out 45 minutes, seven days a week for cardio…at a medium level), my trainer was busy so I had some extra time.  I thought, “what the hell,” and stepped on the scale.  I didn’t really FEEL like I’d lost anything, but good lord!  I was down 2.6 kg (nearly 6 pounds)!!!  I know a LOT of that has to do with water weight from my last trip to the UK, where everything has a ridiculous amount of salt and is deep fried, so it isn’t a true estimate of loss, but it was encouraging nonetheless!

In other news…things with the house is going well.  We hired a painter to come in and paint all the main areas of the house (living/dining/kitchen) along with our master bedroom, so that will get started tomorrow.  The painter we hired will be basically painting EVERYTHING.  Walls, ceilings, taking down and repairing the trim boards if needed, then painting them.  It’ll be so nice to not have to worry about those areas when we move in.  The master bath, spare rooms, and spare bath will be done probably over a weekend…my mom wants to come help out, so we’ll see.  We could have had the entire upstairs painted by the painter, but the quote was for $7,000 and it just seemed like an expense we couldn’t really justify.  We had to have the entry/living room professionally painted because we have 17ft. ceilings…which require scaffolding and the like, so that was something we had to do, but the other rooms can be done on our own.  We picked a bright blue for the living/kitchen/entryway, and then a lighter blue for the dining.  For the bedroom, we picked a grey color, which I’m excited about.

For the living room/kitchen:

 
For the dining room: 

 
For the master bedroom (and master bath, when we get around to remodeling it): 

Turns out we’ll also need to replace the HVAC sooner rather than later.  It’s original to the house, and it does work, but it’s incredibly ineffecient and the bills are ridiculous.  We’re considering geothermal, but need to do more research.  We’ll probably have that replaced around May/June timeframe…right before the heat of summer gets to Indiana (because I can’t live in Indiana in the summer without AC…not gonna happen).  So that goes on the list of things to take care of as well.

Otherwise, things are good here!  I am officially TWO WEEKS away from moving home!!!  I’m really excited and can’t wait to be home for Easter this year (mom and I discussed a menu on the phone yesterday…yummy!), and can’t wait to be in our house and for things to settle down a bit.  Then, a month or so after moving home, it’s time for HAWAII!!!!!  So excited!

Hope you all are having a good day!

XOXOXO,
K.

My personal trainer has been working with me since last October, and even though I’ve been eating much better and working out quite often, I’m still not seeing much in the way of results.  I know I’m much stronger (often times, stronger than Jamie at some things), but the weight is still here.  Part of it has been the constant up and down of traveling every other weekend, going home for two weeks, etc., and I’m sure another part of it is my antidepressants, since I really struggle to lose weight while on my medication (though clearly, if I had to choose between being chubby and being off my rocker, I’ll take that extra layer of flub), but I also just feel like my metabolism has plumeted in the past year. 

So, I talked with my trainer, and he suggested I try a Sport Fasting program that he has training in.  Its a 10 day method where the first three days are a cut back in calories and certain types of food, then three days of “fasting” (allowed fruit juice for B/L/D), and then four days of building back up your diet.  During this 10 days, you take a ridiculous amount of supplements (fish oil, multivitamins, calcium, zing, magnesium, etc.) along with a powder that you mix with water that has a lot of different amino acids and proteins.  I was concerned at first, so I consulted my GP here and he assured me that, as I was a healthy adult, this would be fine and shouldn’t cause me any problems, and to go ahead with the program.

So, here I am…day 2.  Day 1 was pretty simple, 2 pieces of fruit and 250ml of fruit juice in the morning (plus all the supplements), lunch was a salad with 2 tomatoes, 10 olives, EVOO and vinegar (and supplements), and dinner was a veggie stirfy with 2 tablespoons (uncooked…no idea how much it was when cooked) rice (with supplements).  Today was another 2 pieces of fruit and 150ml of juice for breakfast, a stirfry without rice for lunch, and a veggie soup for dinner (all with supplements, of course).  Tomorrow goes to liquids, and then Thursday – Saturday is the fasting period.

I’m weirdly not hungry, but my trainer said that the powder stuff helps with hunger, but it’s such a mental game!  I feel like I should be eating, and I’m craving eating, but I recognize that I’m not hungry, at all!  It’s so weird.  I’m hoping this will help me with getting back on the bandwagon for training and such, but I’m definitely not expecting it to fix everything.  But, I figure, it’s 10 days, and worth a shot!

I’ll definitely update on the progress…so far, Day 2 isn’t bad!

XOXOXO,
K. 

I was really struggling with visualizing what I wanted to do with the home decor in our Master Bedroom and Spare Rooms.  I figured I’d try to create an inspiration board to really see how it all fit together, and I’m so glad I did!  I’ve been playing around with it all day, and I’m not 100% finished, but I like what I have so far!

Here are my ideas for the Master.  I wanted to paint the walls a darker grey, but incorporate some more bold colors.  We plan on painting the living/dining and kitchen blue, so I wanted a way to bring in the blue (a different shade) into our room as well.  So, I settled on a brighter blue and a sunny yellow, to really stand up against the grey walls and darker furniture. 

Then, for the guest room, I wanted to pull in the grey from our room, but use it more as an accent color.  I plan to paint the walls green, then use accents of grey and black to stand out against the green.  I’m still iffy on this one…we already have the furniture (it was our old Master furniture), and I bought a duvet for the bed before we moved here, then never used (it’s very similar to the patterend duvet on the board).  I’m still not sure about the accents though…I need to find different pillows and throws, and considering putting a chair in there, next to the window, to create a sort of reading area in the room

So, what do you think? 

Hope you all had a great weekend!

XOXOXO,
K.

One of the major things I want to do with our new house (we closed last Thursday!!) is to remodel the master bath.  We had initially talked about moving the toilet to the other wall (next to the sink vanity), and then rip out the wall between the shower and where the toilet originally was, and create a larger shower.  Personally, I thought the idea was brilliant (it was mine, after all), but then Jamie realized that the wall behind the toilet, and the wall of the shower didn’t meet up, so one was further ”out” than the other.  I honestly had to have him explain it to me about a billion times because I had no idea where he was talking about, but suffice it to say…we can’t extend the shower because the walls won’t meet up. 

So, option number two was to keep the toilet where it is, keep the shower at the same size, and just tile it in to make it look nicer.  It’s currently one of those plastic shower inserts, and the door is a glazed glass with awful gold colored hinging.  Plus, the last owners must not have cleaned it in god knows how long, because there is moldy grossness in the shower door and on the floor of the plastic.  Yuck.  So, option two became option one, and now we’re planning on keeping the shower the same (maybe bringing it a few inches forward to give it more depth, but that’s it) and tiling it all in so that it’s cleaner and more cohesive.

Here is how our master bathroom looks at present.  I plan on painting the room a grey color to match the master bedroom (I’m also repainting that…the ideas is they will match).  As you can see, the tub is tiled in as well, with a dark blue accent row.  Regardless of what I do with the shower, I will be ripping out that dark blue tile and replacing it with something…or re-tiling in the whole tub, not sure which (depends on cost as well).  The tile around the tub is fine, so there really isn’t a point in re-tiling the whole thing, unless we decide to do something really different with the shower.  That said…I’m pretty cheap, so odds are that won’t happen.  LOL.

Which brings me to ideas…the shower is small.  I originally was thinking we’d do one of those tiny square mosaic tile jobs in a pretty blue…but after seeing a few pictures of smaller spaces done like that on Pinterest, I’m afraid it’s just going to be too busy and cluttered looking.  The photo below is basically the size of the shower that we’d have…and it looks super busy and overwhelming all done with the multi-colored tiled mosaic.  Maybe it’s the colors, I’m not sure, but I feel like it’s just too much. 

I know that I’d like to keep with a grey/blue color scheme…light and as neutral as possible.  I don’t want something super flashy that could get on my nerves over time, and I really want our bathroom to be soothing and an escape area.  Here are some ideas that I’ve come across that sort of peak my interest, but I’m still not set.  I can always use opinions though!!!  I trust you all!

If we were to do something like this, we could keep the tile as is on the tub, and I can use the same accent tile to surround the tub as well as in the shower, which would bring them both together.  Plus, the white may really open up the shower area, since it’s already small. 

I also really like how the mosaic tile looks when it’s in more of a stripe pattern, especially laid vertically.  Maybe if we use light enough colors, it won’t seem so overwhelming?  Thoughts?

Then, no matter what type of tile we plan on doing, we are going to put up a plain glass door, with no brackets, so that it looks more open and without seams.  I really hate how a lot of shower doors have the gold or silver plating around the edges…I think it just breaks up the space too much and makes an already small space look that much smaller.  So, we’ll definitely be going with a single piece of plate glass as the door.

So, what do you guys think!  Any ideas on tiles that I don’t have on here…I’d love to see whatever you think might work!

Hope you all have a great weekend!

XOXOXO,
K.