I finished my blanket, took about a month. This is the first non-baby blanket I have ever made. I think it turned out well.

So it’s like 25° outside and we have our windows open, because living in a 3rd floor apartment is hot as hell when you have radiator heating….lol.

This is such a good thing!

Ohio House votes to repeal state sales tax on tampons

A proposal repealing Ohio’s sales tax on tampons and other feminine hygiene products has cleared the Ohio House.

Second week into my quickbooks class, and I really feel like I’m just reading a user manual….with a really big price tag….

When I first started playing WOW, during Wrath of the Lich King, the previous expansions weren’t yet bundled. This meant that I had to purchase each expansion if I wanted to enjoy them. Because both myself and my husband were playing, this was a bit expensive as it meant buying each expansion pack twice.

So, we decided that our best course of action was to play each expansion to it’s fullest before purchasing the next one. It worked out great for us. Since we didn’t yet have Burning Crusade, our level was capped at 60 until we bought it. Once we hit level 60, rather than immediately purchasing the next expansion we continued to quest and do content available to us in order to fully experience things. Granted it wasn’t exactly a vanilla experience, but it gave us time to enjoy things before moving on and being inundated with new zones, crafting, and features. It was actually quite an enjoyable experience.  We got to enjoy the storylines and dungeons without fear of quickly out leveling the content and we maxed out our characters as best we could before moving on.

I specifically remember have a blast in Burning crusade, the stories have stuck with me and the hours we spent exploring the various zones in outland were very memorable. We didn’t feel pressured to move on since our levels were capped at 70 anyway and we were able to take our time and really get a feel for that part of the game.

I don’t recall exactly when Blizzard began bundling previous expansions into the base game, however what I do know is that this bundling had the effect of removing an obvious solution to problem that some new players face, leveling too quickly & missing content.

While the option exists to go to Stormwind or Orgrimmar and disable experience gain, it is not at all obvious to new players and for players leveling alts its inconvenient. I can’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be an easier way to disable/enable leveling built into the user interface.

Personally, I know I enjoy the leveling experience and I enjoy it most when it’s not a cake walk. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Given the option the disable leveling in an easily accessible way I would most likely use it much more often to enjoy the available pve content before moving on to higher level content. Level scaling is great at giving you the option to level in a variety of more places, but it also compounds the issue of missing out on content because it’s no longer relevant to you. Recently while leveling an alt, I was able to skip the whole of cataclysm because I chose to spend that time in Pandaria. Had I been a new player I would have never really even known about those zone because they were made irrelevant to me.

I understand that a lot of players simply want to get to the most current content and that’s fantastic, however, I believe that some tools for those of us who enjoy the journey a bit more, should be made more easily accessible and explained it bit better.

Perhaps upon reaching level cap for a certain expansion you get a notification informing you that you can disable experience gain in order continue the zones with an easy to toggle option in the character panel.

WOW has a ton of content and seeing it now, even if it isn’t the most recent or current content, is still an amazing experience for new players as well as those of us who really enjoy journey, giving us the ability to disable experience gain in an easily accessible way would really go a long way to ensuring some of the content is enjoyed by at least some new players as well as those players who still really enjoy experiencing the content (even for the 50^th time).

All my life I’ve been a bit of a rebel…sometimes it was a good thing. It has allowed me to find my own path in life and get me to a place where I feel comfortable with myself and my life choices. I did it my way and I’m perfectly okay with that. Other times it’s been a bad thing like when I stayed in relationships that I knew I should have dropped a long time before I actually did it. Those choices ended up costing me and those I care about alot of pain and hurt.

At this point in my life I think I’ve been rebellious so long that I almost do it subconsciously.  When I first discovered the Keto diet I it was through the keto subreddit. I saw all these posts of people who were having all kinds of success. It was a lifestyle that was the antithesis to what I had alway been told was the correct and healthy way to eat. But it seemed like all these people were having great success and enjoying what they were eating. Also it didn’t require me to feel like I was starving myself which was a bonus.

I spent the next few weeks reading various studies, books, and watching videos. It was enough to convince me that I needed to try this. My husband was raised by a very health conscious mother and when I began telling him about it he was very skeptical, as this whole entire lifestyle went against everything she had taught him and, what was and still is the accepted way of eating from most doctors, dieticians and nutritionists.  However, he agreed to give it a go with me and that started our 8 month Journey.

We both lost about 40 pounds during that 8 months and couldn’t believe how well it worked. Then his parents moved in, at that point they were both Sugar junkies. I’m not blaming them but it certainly is hard to avoid sugar when it’s always around. We ended up gaining a good portion of our weight back. It was awful. Eventually they moved out but we didn’t jump back to doing the right thing.

Then in June of 2018 I was diagnosed as having Type II Diabetes. I was prescribed both Metformin and Insulin. But I really didn’t want to start taking medication. With everything that I had learned while doing Keto previously I knew I can beat this if I just changed my lifestyle. I also read the Diabetes Code by Dr. Jason Fung who advocated not only for a low carb lifestyle but intermittent fasting as well. So I immediately decided to go back to keto and I did not start taking medication. My Doctor wanted to see me again in 3 months, well I never started on the medication and began low carb immediately with only some fasting. At the visit where I was diagnosed my A1c was 10.5% and when I went back in 3 months it had dropped to 6.9%. My Doctor was shocked, she said she never saw numbers like that. Well what did I do, I became careless yet again. Because yes it makes total sense to celebrate lowering your blood sugar by having junk food and raising it again….

I know what I need to do, I know I can heal my Diabetes, but I’ve had the hardest time making myself commit. I think what I’ve realized is that subconsciously I was fighting against it because It’s something I know I have to do and yet my nature is to rebel against it. Well apparently I now need to rebel against my own rebelliousness, because honestly at this point my life depends on it. Diabetes can kill if you don’t do something about it, and I really need to do something about.

So this semester one of my classes is accounting. It’s been a pretty tough class for me, but I’m persevering. I honestly found the textbook confusing, luckily I managed to find some tutorial videos on YouTube which really helped me to better grasp the main concept. I think part of what makes it more difficult for me is with my Graves disease it can be hard for me to remember things sometimes, so I’ve sort of struggled with remember things like which types of accounts are expenses or liabilities etc. I spent pretty much all day yesterday doing accounting schoolwork. It was tough, but I pushed through and managed to get A’s on them so at least my hard work is paying off. I think if I would’ve known how much work it was gonna be for me I would’ve taken the class on campus where I could’ve had direct access to a teacher, but I suppose it’s too late for that now. Anyway, I’m gonna just keep pushing and thankfully have Mark to help me with this stuff.

For years I’ve been searching for a way to incorporate fresh fish into my diet. My problem was that I didn’t like the way fresh fish, was so umm Fishy…lol. Well after some searching I found a delicious marinade that we used with Atlantic Salmon yesterday and It was amazing. For the first time ever I really enjoyed fresh fish! We are also going to try this marinade on cod. Anyway I’ve shared the recipe as we made it down below.