Well, I input my first daily meal chart into spark people this morning. Yesterday’s food, and I stayed within most of my limits. I was 65 calories over my daily limit, but I blame that on the fact that I also had two cans of Mountain Dew yesterday instead of the one I’m supposed to have. If I hadn’t had that second can I would have had plenty of “breathing room”.

Today my husband and I are going out for brunch. I had a small serving of cereal for breakfast and a glass of grape juice; and I’m going to make sure to not have soda today, especially as yesterday I only had two cups of water, when you’re supposed to try and have at least eight. We have great water in our house I have no excuse to not drink it, especially as I got reusable cups to have it in, travel cups, and also those little 0-5 calorie flavor sachets so it’s not just plain old boring water.

Anyway, really that’s not bad for my first day of sticking to things. 65 calories over for the day will be made up elsewhere during the week, but it just points out to me how much more work I have to do to keep my attitude in the right spot.

As you know I’ve been going very haphazard on that in the past year, but I’m really starting to focus on things properly now. I think I’m in a much better place mentally. I joined Spark People at the recommendation of a fellow Mom, and I’m looking into their tips and things, as well as the bits and pieces I know already.

It’s about making life style changes. Now that hubbie’s feeling better from his surgery we’re going to be working together at this. It’s not as simple for me as just taking something like Phentermine and being done with it.

I want to make sure that I improve everywhere so that’s it’s easier to stick with this and I don’t wind up doing a yo-yo thing like I have before.

…it was just one of THOSE days, you know where everything goes wrong that could possibly go wrong.

Mix-ups with appointments, angry child, spilled coffee. Urgh. The final straw was when I tried to just nip into the grocery store to pick up a prescription, wound up there for a half hour with a crabby child who needed/wanted a nap and then locked my keys in the trunk of the car.

Thankfully hubbie was up and able to come and rescue me so I didn’t have to wait for AAA given he’d been woken up an hour before because of the appointment mix-up.

I wound up going to bed early thanks to a fibro flare. I’m still a bit stiff and sore this morning, but glad to have survived yesterday and be able to put it behind me. I’ve finally been able to coordinate with hubbie’s schedule and the massage person he got me a coupon for at Valentine’s Day and have an hour massage scheduled for Wednesday, so that’s good. I’ve been trying to get that for a while, but couldn’t and then didn’t because I wanted to wait until after hubbie’s surgery by that point.

So, here we are.

We’ve been having a lot of trouble with bugs coming in the house. I’ve had to put some fresh weather stripping on the front door, and we’ve been thinking about getting exterior shutters on some of the windows. In a last ditch effort we’ve put up some of those sticky bug catching strips but they’re very ugly hanging all over the house.

I ordered some Venus Fly Traps to see if that will help, as it will at least be less tacky than the huge yellow sticky strips hanging everywhere, occasionally getting stuck in our clothes, and cheaper than the shutters for the time being.

I confess I’m slightly more enamored with the idea of having fly eating plants in our house it appeals to my sense of “the weird”.

I know a lot of people who are looking for new and better jobs at the moment. The economy is rough and it’s hard to find work, especially work in your own area, or that’s in an area you’re familiar with. I remember our friend Jer who did our water treatment system was saying that they had people from all walks of life showing up at their office willing to do reception work even if that wasn’t something that they normally did.
I’ve been giving several friends some pointers on their resume lately, mostly just spell checking, and I was reminded that it’s important also do cover letters, and to write thank you letters for people who have interviewed you and things like that, which help keep you fresh in their mind and remind them about you so that you’re more likely to be selected.

Best of luck to anyone out there who is job hunting.

Here’s some pictures from the munchkin’s birthday and the morning after.

This one is from first thing in the morning when he was opening the presents that Great-Gran from England sent while Mum had her on the phone.

Paddington Bear is apparently better read upside down.

Here’s the amazing cake that Becka made, it has Sarah from LBT on it, and then Clifford, Elmo and Curious George all having a party.

Blowing out the candles (not that you can really see that portion of things)

The fire pit in action

The next day Mum came over and the munchkin took her outside and patted the bike and told her “Seat! Seat!” so she had to sit down and show him how the bike worked.

It was a good time had by all, as I said before. Munchkin keeps asking me to sit on his bike too, but I can’t bend down that low…it’s been so tiring lately that my limbs are too achy thanks to the fibromyalgia. Stupid illnes.

It’s coming up on Sunday. I was really out of touch with the days and nearly had a heart attack when it finally connected that it was THIS Sunday. Wow.
My Mum had been talking about having a day out at the beach. We’d been debating about finding one of those cheap hotels to stay in, but with her work and hubbie still recuperating that’s not an option right at the minute. It’s going to be a while before he restocks any vacation time.
We might be able to do things while he’s on sick leave, but I’m leery about going too far a field for too long in case something happens while he’s healing.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do for Mother’s Day. Hubbie had been wanting to go and see “Iron Man” but I’m not sure if we’ll be able to do that. Plus his Dad wants to come up and see the place now that we’ve had time to fix things up. I guess this means I actually have to finish my cleaning project which I keep starting and then flaking out on.

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII quite a bit lately trying to relax. I had to restart the game almost, from about ten hours in, which is rough as I was over a hundred hours in.

Hubbie is recovering fairly well. He’s still in a lot of pain, but he’s recovering well, and is able to eat solid food.

Another thing that I’ve been doing is writing quite a bit. I started a new FanFiction.net account: at this place so that I can re-write and edit my work without as much issue as I was having, and that’s going well. I’ve already re-submitted several pieces and they’re getting some hits, and I’ve been receiving some encouragement from reviewers, which is nice.

I had a flat tire over the weekend but was able to get it patched yesterday and didn’t have to replace the whole tire. My mechanic told me that in another 2000 miles they’ll rotate my tires again and then I should have another 10000 or so before I have to replace them, so that’s good to know as that’s going to be about $300-$350 to replace all the tires.

Today I have therapy, we’re doing weekly appointments now. I have to drive to a different office this week, but it’s only about fifteen minutes from my friend who is babysitting’s house, so that’s going to work out fairly well.

It may be similar on the other Gateway laptops but I figured I should clarify right off the bat that mine is a slightly older model a 450-ROG, but I know it has similar parts as other Gateway models given what came up when I was looking for the replacement part in the first place. I have to thank PC Partners for the keyboard. Not only was it a very cost-effective price but they had it to me in just over a day, even though I didn’t pay for expedited shipping. It was greatly appreciated as I’d been without a keyboard for almost two weeks by that point even though I ordered one from another company the day the laptop broke and it never came. Thankfully I got the money back on that, otherwise there would have been a LOT of trouble, that company had initially charged me triple what PC Partners did and never contacted me or anything.

Anyway, on to how I did it:

First, here is the poor disheveled and broken laptop:

Note the lack of attached space bar. I had tried to just clip the space bar back on but the hook pieces were broken and so they would not reattach.

Here is the nice shiny new keyboard:

First you pop off the clips that cover the screws which attach the monitor to the base. You don’t need to disconnect the monitor, it just makes it easier to do the next steps if those are off.

After the clips are off, use the flat of a screwdriver to pop the flat piece off that has the power button and all the shortcut buttons off, leaving the computer this.

There are several screws attaching the keyboard to the laptop base. The first of which is seen in the photo. Keep the screws because the new keyboard doesn’t come with any.

After the screws are undone, you can start to lift the keyboard out. It’s still attached to the base via a pin plug which has to be popped out to disconnect the keyboard fully.

Behold the semi-naked computer:

Attach the plug on the new keyboard into the slot you just took the old one out of.

Then put the screws back in, and you can replace the protectors.

And the power/shortcut button panel.

Then the computer is once again ready to use.

So, that’s how you can replace the keyboard of a laptop for relatively cheap. I paid less than $20 including shipping and handling for my replacement keyboard. A great deal given the laptop cost me $2000 when I bought it new, and we don’t have the funds to replace the whole thing.

I’m pleased to report that our house is tonsillitis free.

It’s been a long day, but right now we’re making the most of down time.

I was up at 4:30 a.m. because the munchkin woke up having a royal fit about something, and decided just to stay up given we had to have my husband to the hospital at 6 a.m. He got home from work and we did a quick turn around and were out of the door. I loaded the car last night and I’m glad we did.

We got in and I was shown to a waiting area with the munchkin while they prepped hubbie and got him set up and then we were allowed to come back to see him until they took him down for surgery at 7:20 a.m.

Munchkin and I went “off-campus” to get breakfast and when I came back it turned out hubbie had come out of surgery around the time we had been getting our food, and was “doing well” unlike last time at the other hospital where they then lost him for almost an hour and found him again only to tell me he had not in fact had surgery when they’d previously left me a message saying that everything was fine, this time he actually was doing pretty well. They were getting his pain managed and then after another twenty minutes and two munchkin escapes we were allowed to go back and see him, and while he was still in some pain he was feeling wonderful because he knew the tonsils were gone.

We were able to come home around noon, after I explained to the nurse that hubbie works nights normally and is used to being asleep during the day and that’s why he was having a hard time staying awake, not entirely the anesthetic lingering.

So, we were home by 1:30 after we stopped and picked up his prescriptions for pain killers, which is a lot better than last time, given last time even though he didn’t even HAVE the operation we didn’t get out of the hospital until almost four.