My Special Project

We’ll start this post with the weekly weigh-in.   I’ve been sticking to my “only weigh in on Monday” rule for several weeks now, but this week, I had a bit of a dilemma.  I thought I’d done pretty well all week long, but Sunday was my race, and I have one rule on race day:  no matter how well or how crappy the race might have been, I always take the kids to Bagger Dave’s for dinner that night.  I absolutely love, love, love hamburgers, and especially good ones with lots of toppings and nice, soft bun.  Plus fries.  And dessert.  Ha ha, okay, I like lots of food, but I am pretty good about restraining myself most of the time, and I feel like I’m allowed a splurge meal when I run a race!

I had been so busy on Sunday with the race, then grocery shopping (it had to be done!), and then hockey, I actually had only eaten a banana and half a Lara bar (bought at Meijer when I started feeling kind of weak and realized I’d forgotten to eat!).  So the good news is, I had plenty of calories left, and by golly, I was going to Bagger Dave’s come hell or high water!

Of course, I got my big burger with all the fixings (for me, that’s smoked gouda, lettuce, tomato, onion, mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, and their Southwest chipotle sauce).

It was so good.  So so so good.  I actually didn’t eat many of the fries because I was full from the burger…and the drink:

I got the white sangria this time, and it was as yummy as the red!

When it came time for dessert, the kids were really leery about getting the brownie again.  After my last race, we’d gone to Bagger Dave’s and gotten the usual, but the brownie we’d gotten had a weird, smoky taste, almost like it was burnt. :/  Brownies were all they had Sunday night, however (they were changing their dessert menu the very next day, ha ha!), and I really wanted dessert 😛 , so I convinced the kids to give it a try.  The waitress heard us talking about it and she said that they microwave the brownies right before they’re served, and someone may have burned something in the microwave before ours was heated the last time.  She assured us that nothing had been burned that day, so the kids agreed to try it.

And it was great!! (As you can probably tell, since it’s already half gone in that picture!)

The next morning, I really, really wanted to postpone my weigh-in.  😮  But I forced myself to do it, and…

Ha.  What do you know?  A two-pound loss!  I did leave about 500 calories on the table on Sunday, even after the big dinner, so I guess that helped!  Yay for running two races on Sunday morning, ha ha!  I’m glad that I was able to lose weight, because Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and although we are not having a big get-together with family, the four of us are having a small dinner at home with the usual stuff.  I plan to have a good long run in the morning to help me earn some of that dinner. Oh, and also to help me work off the gift that I received today from a school mom whose family portraits I did earlier this month.  I didn’t charge her, of course, but she found a way to pay me:

Oh. My. God.  That is homemade cinnamon bread and it is ah-mazing!!  I saw her at the football team bonfire last month and she mentioned that she’d made one that week, and I was exclaiming over how delicious it sounded.  Lucky for me, she listens well and decided it would be the perfect thank-you gift for the pictures! 😀  I’m going to try not to eat the whole thing… 😮

Okay, and finally, I’ll show you my “special project,” the one I had to rush to finish and then figure out how to display!  I’m sure you’ve figured out that it has to do with pictures, ha ha, but did you figure out what it actually was??

That, my friends, is a 2′ x 4′ banner, and besides the one I made for my own kid, I made 15 more for all the kids on his hockey team!  And then, after going through great pains to get them done in time for the team’s home opener, I had to figure out how to hang them at the rink!  But thanks to some helpful staff members, I got it done, just in the nick of time before Saturday night’s home opener.

As you can tell, I am really, really proud of these.  They were absolutely the most difficult thing I’ve done, photographically speaking.  It wasn’t even creating the banners that was challenging; I’ve been using Photoshop in my line of work for well over a decade, so the mechanics of something like that aren’t new to me.  It was the actual photography aspect that was positively nerve-wracking. Taking team pictures for a high school hockey team is very different from youth teams, especially in a town as small as ours, where all the local sports teams get a lot of attention (because there’s not much else going on, ha ha!).  There was also a lot of pressure, because the school’s football and volleyball teams had had banners done for their games, and that’s how I ended up doing these; a few of the moms asked if I could do something like that, and although I was fairly confident I could, I didn’t want to disappoint them.  (I was later told by one of the moms that her son, who had been skeptical about getting banners done “like the volleyball team,” had come home after seeing the finished product and told her, “Mom, these are nothing like the volleyball team’s.  These are awesome!!” 😉  )

My biggest worry was getting the pictures right–it’s not as easy as you’d think! Especially teenaged boys, who in my experience are usually pretty uncomfortable in front of the camera.  I did learn some valuable lessons and had to do a few retakes (and reprints at my own expense), but overall, I’m very proud of them.  All of the parents were very complimentary, and I especially loved watching people walk into the arena and see their eyes widen when they caught sight of the 16 banners on the wall.  It made it feel like a “real” hockey arena, ha ha!  I was also tickled to death to see some of the fans (mostly parents, I suspect!) taking pictures of their favorite player’s banner when they were up at the rink.

Talk about a compliment!

Thanks for letting me go on and on and on about my little project.  🙂 I was pretty much living, eating, and breathing all those hockey team pictures for a week and a half, but the feeling of accomplishment I received from all that hard work (especially the banners) definitely made it all worthwhile.

Thanks for reading!