A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away… when I thought about becoming a mother, I knew that I wanted to change my diet, and I did for awhile with the help of Weight Watchers Online.  I got to a reasonable weight at which to be pregnant (not the ideal weight by a long shot… but if I waited long enough until I got to the ideal weight, I’d be that much closer to menopause with not so fresh eggs).  Then I got pregnant and all Hell broke loose.  Well, I shouldn’t say that.  I did really really well the first 6 months with my diet.  I made sure I ate as many fruits and vegetables as I could stomach and I felt pretty good about how I was eating.  And then the holiday season started and the new rules I had set for myself went out the window.  Since then, I’ve had my good days where I eat what I should and my bad days where I don’t.  As Lark starts to eat more and more solids, the realization that I must change how I eat forever becomes ever more clear.  I want to start her on the right path from the get go and as she grows, I want to help her understand why it’s better to eat healthily.  But I can’t preach what I don’t practice.

I’m going on a journey to embracing a healthy lifestyle.  I’m starting in baby steps.  My first step is I’m going to learn, in-depth, how the body works and how what I eat affects it.  I’m reading Dr. Oz’s “YOU:  The Owners Manual.”

Stay tuned for further developments…

Practice makes perfect and I think my drum teacher would be horrified to learn that I normally only practice for 1 – 2 hours a week every week and I still pass my lessons.  That was until lately.  I have reached a point where it’s crucial to practice.  I can master my lessons in 1 – 2 hours a week, but when I go to play them for my instructor, I flub up – a lot.  So this week I was going to make it a point to practice every day.  So go ahead.  Ask me how long I’ve practiced so far this week?  Ready for the answer?  ZERO.  I have not practiced at all this week.  I intend to practice tomorrow, but we’ll see how that goes.  Oh well.  It’ll just take me longer to get to where I’m playing things faster.  And I still love it, it’s very relaxing.  So I’m sticking with it and I just have to be okay that when I play for the teacher to pass off my lessons, it’s not going to be perfect and it won’t be very fast (unless it happens to be a very easy lesson that week).  And that’s okay.

Tomorrow I turn 37.  I really don’t feel one way or another about it.  It is a little frightening to think that I probably still have about 30 years of working life to go before retirement.  That seems like an awful long time. I don’t think I thought much of turning 36 last year except I was pregnant and having to take all the “old pregnant lady” tests, I may have felt a little “over the hill.”  But put into perspective, I’m not at a bad age.  Not too old, not too young.  Just about right.

I have a lot I want to focus on through the coming year: being the best wife I can be to Martin; being the best Mom I can be to Lark; getting back down to a healthy weight and completely change my eating habits so I can teach Lark how to be healthy; learn Photoshop; improve my photographic skills; quit worrying about anything and everything and have some fun.  All worthy goals, methinks.  

So here’s to another year older and wiser… cheers!

I apologize for the lack of new posts for several months now, but I’m back!  I promise at least one new post every week.  Stay tuned for a few new posts in the next few days to make up for my lack of posts…

10. Staying Alive -  The Saturday Night Fever sequel is no where near the quality of the original.  It reeks.  And yet, I’ve seen it more than a few times.  The plot is terrible.  It follows a self-indulgent Tony Manero’s quest to become a professional dancer on Broadway since that’s the natural progression from disco dancing at the club.  The key to getting on broadway is to have sex with the lead female dancer who then suggests to her director that you should have a part in his show.  Then when her co-star sucks during rehearsals, you approach the director to audition for his part and voila, you’re in a Broadway show. Oh what luck!  And we’re supposed to feel good that Tony gets back at “the man” in the end by breaking script and dancing his own moves during opening night, despite the fact that he’s been a complete ass to his ever faithful girlfriend during the entire movie.  Granted this was the early 80s and film in general was less enlightened toward women.  So why have I seen this movie so many times?  Honestly, it’s the dancing, the leotards, and the headbands.

9. Love Story - I want to puke every time I watch this movie, yet it’s not a completely unpleasant feeling.  I always gag after the heavily quoted line of “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  Ya, right!  Whoever wrote that must be divorced by now because love means having to say you’re sorry more than you would normally because you give a damn about the other person’s feelings.  That aside, it’s a movie classic with terrible incredibly sappy dialog and plot which makes it quite fun to watch if only to mock it.  And I’m sentimental about the theme song since my Mom used to play it on the piano all the time as I grew up. Shout out to Henry Mancini.

8. Because I Said So - This movie tried to cash in on Diane Keaton’s renewed industry “hotness” after Something’s Gotta Give.  Bluck.  It’s about an overbearing mother who interferes with her daughters’ lives, particularly her youngest played by Mandy Moore. So get this… she’s so desperate for her daughter to marry that SHE places a personal ad for her daughter on some website after “accidentally” coming across a few porn sites that she can’t get out of (and later we see her visiting those same porn sites just for fun).  So what makes this movie so bad, yet good?  It’s how annoying Diane Keaton’s character is in a poorly written movie.  If my mother ever behaved the way this woman does, I’d move and never tell her where I live. Yet I get the feeling that the intent is for Keaton’s character to be likable.  Failed!    

7. Simply Irresistible - Terrible, terrible movie that relies on the audience to suspend disbelief beyond disbelief.  This one was trying to cash in on the popularity of Like Water For Chocolate.  Denied!  Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a cook in her dead Mother’s restaurant who can’t cook until she buys – wait for it – a magic crab.  Poof!  She’s the most fantastic cook ever! She runs into a guy who manages a department store whose girlfriend trashes all of the restaurant’s dishes, so he offers to replace them.  They fall in love.  Or is he just in love with her food? And does she really have a magic crab or is she just a witch?  Hmmm. Questions questions.  What makes me laugh is the insanely delicious food in question are standard looking eclairs that you can find at any old grocery store.  Nothing about them makes my mouth water.  And towards the end, Sarah Michelle Gellar is cooking for the opening night of a restaurant and somehow her emotions are getting into the food making the entire restaurant laugh and cry.  Whatever.  You know I had a magic crab once.  His name was Bernie.  I ate him with a lovely bernaise sauce and a nice chianti.

6. The Stepford Wives (2004) - What makes this remake so entertaining are the many holes in the plot.  The original ended with all the wives being killed and replaced by robots.  The remake starts off with the same concept as the original where the women are robots and it gives the impression they are murdered.  In order to give the movie a happy ending, the women are no longer robots, but have microchips implanted into their brains to make them behave as the men would like them to.  Yet, it’s never explained how this microchip allows for a woman to become an ATM, literally; for her to burn her hand without physical evidence of the burn; and how she can overheat with steam coming out of her body and after square dancing.  Make it a game and see how many plot points don’t make any sense.  Weeeee!

5. The Hotel New Hampshire - I haven’t read the book, but I am a fan of John Irving and I understand he can find comedy in truly dark moments.  I loved World According to Garp, A Prayer For Owen Meany, and The Cider House Rules, etc.  But I have a hard time thinking this movie was what he had in mind when he wrote The Hotel New Hampshire.  It was made into a comedy romp with rape and incest thrown in with the expectation that the audience will take these parts of the movie seriously.  It has a decent cast including Jody Foster, Rob Lowe, Beau Bridges, etc., so it’s difficult to know if what feels like terrible acting is a result of bad directing, a terrible script, or truly bad acting (you can’t be fabulous all the time).  

4. Basic Instinct - Horrible, terrible dialogue.  I will never be able to watch this movie in the same way again after seeing my Dad do his version of the “leg crossing” scene during a charades type of game.  Hysterical!  

3. Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls - I sincerely admire Roger Ebert for trying his hand at writing a movie. What I love about this one, is that the movie goes in one direction for 3/4 of the movie, following an all girl band in the 60s and their shenanigans.  Suddenly towards the end it turns into a horror movie with decapitations and dead band mates.  To quote Bill and Ted, “Excellent”!!!! 

2. Showgirls - Poor Elizabeth Berkeley.  You try to make an “adult” movie and look what happens – death to your career.  I’ll admit, I was a fan of Saved By The Bell, so when this came out, I was very curious as to exactly how naughty could it be.  Laughably naughty!  Bad acting, bad dialogue, even bad sex scenes, but I love the dancing, I love the cattiness amongst the dancers, and I love Gina Gershon’s character, and I love Las Vegas.

1. The Color of Night - This stars Bruce Willis, Jane March, and Ruben Blades.  It came out about the time I finished my bachelor’s degree in Psychology, so the material is right up my alley.  The premise is a psychotherapist loses his ability to see the color red because his patient commits suicide by throwing herself out of the window of his high-rise office and he was traumatized by all the blood on the ground.  Apparently, high-rises have very flimsy glass.  And it’s truly amazing that the shrink could even see the blood on the ground being he’s on the 50th floor.  He must have hawk vision and they forgot to mention it.  The psychological problems portrayed in this film are so ridiculous and unbelievable that it makes the movie fun to watch. It’s another movie with terrible dialogue.  Oddly, I looked up the writer and director of this movie, and they are credible filmmakers and have good movies behind their belts.  What happened to this project, one has to wonder.  My favorite part is during a sex scene between Bruce Willis and Jane March.  The director thought it would be uber artsy to shoot through a piece of desk art and after a romp in a swimming pool cut to a couple of hang gliders flying around in the sky while dramatic sex music plays in the background.  What the $%&*?  It’s a fun film to mock and to watch repeatedly.  Highly recommended, my number one.

I hate to admit this, but since I’ve been on maternity leave I watch waaaaay to much TV.  Now, I watched waaaaaay to much TV before, but this is getting ridiculous.  I can actually feel IQ points slipping away (good thing I was a super genius to begin with so I have a few to spare – hardy har har).  I figure there’s a couple of reasons why this has happened: a) I’ve been working full-time since I was 18 and have never in my life had so much time off and I haven’t figured out how to fill in the time and b) I have a beautiful baby who likes to eat too much when she breast feeds so to prevent her from throwing up all of her meals I feed her for shorter periods of time but more often.  As a result, I end up on the couch in front of the tube for most of the day.  The weather hasn’t helped.  We’ve only had two days since Lark was born where the weather was warm enough to take her outside for a walk. Needless to say I’m starting to get a little tiny bit o’ cabin fever.  All work and no play makes Alysia a dull girl.  What’s a girl to do?  Start a blog of course!  So, I thought I’d at least put some of this TV watching to use and provide a little break down of some shows that I watch.  My motto for the day is “I watch the crap so you don’t have to.”    

• Shows to watch to fall asleep to while the Baby Naps - Any news programming from 7am to 10am.  Although I watch Fox13 most of the time to catch the weather, sometimes I do alternate between the national shows like Good Morning America and The Today Show.  I’m couped up in my house and we’re in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression and I just had a baby.  The last thing I want to dwell on is the reality of the state of the world.  So I choose to use it as background noise to fall asleep to.  Sometimes I’m lucky and the fashion and cooking segments make it into my dreams.
• Daytime Talk Shows - Holy gravy boat Batman!  There are so many talk shows out there and only so many hours in a day!  So I only watch 3 sometimes 4 or 5.  Oprah & Dr Phil are my standards that I usually don’t miss unless KUTV channel 2 decides it needs to preempt them with college basketball (Puke!) or breaking news like a traffic jam or something.  Oprah is a quality program.  I particularly love her Friday shows this season where she has a panel of guests and they talk about what went down during the week.  Plus she actually provides useful information regularly like shows on aging, managing finances, being healthy, cooking, etc. Dr. Phil is not a quality program.  In fact, I can’t say that I really like Dr. Phil.  I find him self indulgent.  He has this need to involve himself with headlining stories, like the Britney Spears’ meltdown and now his favorite of late is “Octo-Mom.”  Does he really get involved because he thinks he can help, or because it’ll get his name out there and more people will watch his show?  Hmmm… methinks the latter.  And any informational programs he may have, his ulterior motive is to sell either his own books or his friends books.  Yet, I can’t help but watch.  It’s like a train wreck.  He bugs me, yet I must watch.  I’m not sure why.  I must enjoy being bugged.  If I had more hours to watch, Ellen would be on my must see list.  I haven’t seen a show of hers I didn’t enjoy.  I did catch the episode where she had her wife on the show.  They’re an incredibly cute couple.  Moving on… 
• Junk Food For The Brain - God I love Days of Our Lives!  This has been a staple of mine since I was a teen.  Well, there was a period in the 90s where I didn’t watch, but with the invention of DVRs, I rarely miss an episode.  Why oh why you ask?  Because the show doesn’t require a lot of brain power and after a long day of doing financials, office politics, etc. watching a show that I can just have on that doesn’t require any thinking is a beautiful thing.  And if you do happen to miss a month of episodes – never fear – you can pick up right where you were because they will still be in the midst of the same story line.  And it’s amazing how quickly the children age, nearly 5 times the normal rate!  For example, Sammi Brady had twins mid-2008.  These twins are now 3 years old and in preschool.  Wow!  But really, it’s a great show to wind down to from a long day of work. 
• Nighttime Talk Show - The Graham Norton Show on BBC America is by far the funniest talk show I’ve ever seen!  He’s had me laughing so hard, I’ve nearly peed my pants on several occasions!  I’m surprised no one has stolen his format here in the US.  Give it time and someone probably will, but I doubt they’ll be able to do it nearly as well as Graham Norton.  I particularly enjoy the segments where he takes audience members and puts them into embarrassing yet hysterical situations.  For example, on a re-run I saw this past week, one of his guests was Nigella Lawson.  He had a guy from the audience dress up like Nigella and make a dish as Nigella fed him directions.  One of the ingredients was a Swedish delicacy of rancid fish that Graham had shown a YouTube video of someone eating earlier in the show to illustrate how truly disgusting the fish was.  He had the audience member smell the fish, but he wasn’t mean enough to try to get him to eat it.  One of my favorites is on another show, Graham was having a little talent show and there was a guy who looked like an overweight office worker who did a really cool dance to the original James Bond theme.
• Guilty Pleasures - Most of what is on Bravo these days are complete guilty pleasures.  I can’t miss an episode of The Real Housewives of New York.  If you watched the latest episode this week (and if you haven’t, I strongly recommend it.  It has a highly entertaining cat fight), I’m on team Bethany.  Kelly is a complete narcissist who thinks she’s a bigger celebrity than she is. Oh, I could go on and on… Anyway… I love Top Chef, Project Runway (which is moving to Lifetime this summer, aka the “rape and abuse” channel as affectionately titled by my husband Martin – What the f&$* ???), and Millionaire Matchmaker.  But the best guilty pleasure of all, which also happens to be husband cringe inducing… America’s Next Top Model!  Ladies, if you’re wanting some downtime from your hubby… just turn on this gem and they will flee the room faster than you can say Tyra. But what’s not to love?  Fashion, makeup, catty model wannabes, Mr and Miss J… it’s all there, again what’s not to love?  I could have a new guilty pleasure if there are re-runs as I only caught the last two shows of the season:  RuPaul’s Drag Race on VH-1.  I love drag queens and I loved what I saw of RuPaul’s show. It’s a cross between America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway where at the end of the program the two drag queens who did the worst in the challenges have a lip sync-off.  How brilliant is that????  OH!  And I have to include VH1′s Rock Of Love with Bret Michaels.  Poor Bret, three seasons and still can’t find Miss Right.  I was really bummed when he broke up with Amber from last season since she seemed like a very well put together woman who had a brain and used it.  The show’s fun to watch, but I think Bret should find another avenue for finding true love, ‘cuz the women in the final 3 – I don’t see any of them working out.  Perhaps he’ll come to the same conclusion and it’ll be a shocking end to the season.
•  Reality TV - Right now, my favorite Reality TV shows are The Amazing Race, Survivor, and BBC America’s Last Restaurant Standing.  I missed the first few seasons of The Amazing Race, but now I’m hooked.  I think Martin would kick ass on Survivor, but I can’t talk him into trying out for the show.  And I love the premise of Last Restaurant Standing where a top chef, Raymond Blanc, gives several couples a restaurant to open and by giving each couple challenges and evaluating how well their restaurants perform in those challenges, he ultimately decides which business he’s going to keep open and become a business partner with.  I also like that the competitors don’t spend their time beating up or talking smack about the other competitors.  It’s a friendly competition which you don’t see very often anymore.     

Well, that’s all I’m going to say for now.  Believe me, there are many many shows I’m watching that I haven’t mentioned here.  But I only have a month left of maternity leave and thank goodness Lark is starting to become more alert and interactive, so a TV intervention or rehab will not be necessary.