iDont Love the iPhone

Yesterday, Dave and I went to the local Apple store (one of three in our area) to buy the iPhone 3G for myself. Dave has had an iPhone for several months and loves it and the many neat gadgets associated with the phone. I've always been a blackberry sort of girl but after using Dave's phone to view websites and watch you tube videos I was kinda leaning toward buying one for myself. We went to the Apple store 15 minutes after opening and were greeted at the door with a line of 50 customers before us already waiting to get their own phones. I about threw my body on the floor and began pounding the cement with my fists in frustration. iPhones were so last week and here we are 9 days later and people are still waiting several hours in line just to get their hands on one. Plus we live in a town where there are THREE Apple stores within a 30 minute drive of where we live. I feel sorry for the suckers who live in towns where there is only one Apple store for several hours. So after waiting in line for an hour we are told that we are in luck. It will take us several more hours to reach the front on the line but! a phone will be available for us. So we wait, and wait, and wait. I get my phone, pay $400, and viola it is activated. I've been playing with the phone since yesterday afternoon and have so far been very disappointed with the iPhone. I think I may be the very 1st person on the planet who didn't have a previous grudge against Apple that actually is disappointed. The reasons I don't like the iPhone:

1. It's not easy to personalize the thing. There are many cool apps available on the phone but once you download the app then you are stuck with it's stock appearance. I want to make my calendar pink, my backdrop purple, and my alarm clock snooze on a 5 minute schedule versus the stock 10 which allow me to go right back to sleep.

2. It's screen rests against my cheek and gets all make-upey and oily. Yuck.

3. I cannot for the life of me get my work email to download onto the damn thing. It says that email download wasn't successful but wont give me an error code or tell me why the download wasn't successful. Is my server not available? Did I enter the password wrong? Is my work firewalling the download???

4. Hubby and I can't share CDs on the iPod portion. We have to buy a physical CD and then download it to each of our iPhones. We can't buy songs in iTunes and then share. That sucks.

5. I'm sure I'll think of others. I still haven't imported my contacts from my palm software to the Outlook software that iPhone mandates you use. I don't expect this to be easy.

Spoiled

Yesterday I went to the mall to get a few new Wacoal bras (nothing but the best for my boobies). Seriously, if you're bigger then a B cup and looking for a bra then I highly recommend Wacoal. They are pricey but so very comfortable and cute.

Anyways, I was walking through the mall on my way to Nordstrom's for the bras when I passed by the Coach store and saw that it was having a sale. I walked in and and 5 minutes later walked out with 4 new pairs of shoes. One pair of killer heels, blue patchwork sneakers, and signature sneakers in brown and black. Overkill yes but worth every penny. Even better was that when I returned home I immediately showed my husband my new shoes and he didn't kill me over the $500 in purchases. Now if I can only get him to agree to the z4 which I still want very, very badly.

Clothes, Woes, Boys, and Toys

Weight Loss
When Dave and I first began our healthier lifestyle resolution we elevated the challenge by adding weekly goals and rewards/punishments. Going in to this I though "no problem!" since I am the Queen of Weight Loss and Dave is Mr Never Touched a Gym in His Life as well as the Baron of Taco Bell. Dave has always been athletically built and good at sports but beyond that has never had to try to stay fit therefore I thought I had an advantage to this whole challenge. I was born from the womb short and round and I've had to battle my figure my whole life.

Well, I greatly underestimated the competitive nature of my spouse. Had I known that all I had to do was issue a challenge I would have done this much sooner in order to motivate Dave to work out daily. Not only has he joined my gym and gone daily for 45 minutes but he has also completely revamped his eating habits (gone is fast food) as well as given up soda! This is huge coming from the man who used to drink 5-6 cans of coca cola a day. As of Week 1 Dave had lost 7 pounds and I had lost 3. Week 2 was tampered when we took a mini-vacation to a local snow resort and I re-gained the 3 from week 1 plus one I had lost in week 2 (total of 4 pounds). Dave regained 2 pounds. I'm really trying to make this healthy lifestyle something that I can do everyday for the rest of my life and evidently the vacation eating part of my lifestyle needs some tweaking.

Dreams of Our Fathers
Sunday night I had numerous dreams about boys I had dated in the past. Last night I dreamt of several scary wars in which I was forced to do battle. The boy dreams I enjoyed mostly because they involved lots of necking and heavy petting. The war dreams not so much. In one dream a tank was firing rapid succession at me and the ammo was oranges. It is citrus season here in Cali and obviously I have eaten one too many oranges.

Working Girl
I'm still insanely busy and working 12 hour days plus weekends. Luckily Dave is gone for work this week which allows me to work late into the night without feeling guilty. Now that it has been 3 months since the fires I am starting to get real tired of this schedule. Taking this past Monday off for our mini-vacay was refreshing but I can't keep doing this same schedule. Starting next week I am going to focus more on me and work only 9 hour days plus Saturdays. Dave is super motivated to do the gym thing and I'm going to make time to go to the gym with him as soon as my day has ended (4pm).

In other news, a National news crew is coming out next week to film our fire recovery work. I really would have liked to be much thinner but am trying not to stress over it too much. What am I saying? I am stressing over it big time! (to further clarify I am stressing over my weight not the national news part).

Shiny Toys
I got the new Sirius Stiletto 2 last week and I LOVE it. I'm already a big fan of Sirius but now I can take my Sirius with my when I go to the gym or out hiking! It's super small (about the size of a video IPOD) and light weight too. Now I am just waiting for the arm strap that I ordered to come so that I can stop treating it like a delicate flower.

Suddenly a Tennassee Titans Fan

Note to Self: When attending a NFL football playoff game, it might help if you are actually a fan of the home team. Otherwise you will spend a majority of the game fuming at the drunken douche bagginess of the home team fans. It didn't help that 95% of the fans in attendance were Chargers fans and only 5% of the rest were Titans fans. This meant that the drunken (and winning) Chargers fans felt it was their duty to yell insensitive slurs at the cowering Titans fans who were just trying to enjoy the game. It was worse then a Raiders versus Chargers game (at least then even when the game is played in San Diego a majority of the fans are wearing black and besides no one dares mess with the Raider Nation). Dave and I are neither Chargers not Titans fans but we had free tickets in the club level which meant great seats under cover from the rain and free food and booze. I would go again for the chance to watch a playoff game but after experiencing 3 hours of drunk asswhats I almost declared that alcohol and tailgating should be banned at games (this coming from me who is a huge fan of the beer in all situations and lovingly remembers tailgating from many Fresno State football games). Yet, you too would have immediately proclaimed that all games should be alcohol free after watching drunk idiots stumbling around trying to pick fights (unless you were a drunken idiot picking fights then you would have thought it to be a great time for all). Astonishingly enough we were in the club level where seats were $300-400 each and those in the cheaper seats on field level and in the higher decks encountered even more douche bagery and crowd fighting.

In more uplifting news, I've lost 45 pounds on three different occasions only to regain most of the weight back within one year. The latest time I lost the weight was for my wedding and already 25 pounds of that has crept back up on me. I am realizing that I am good at the losing but not so good at the keeping off. In the past I will practically starve myself for 6 months, drop tons of weight, and then become tired of the restrictions and go hog wild in the opposite direction. I really need to find a sensible eating plan that I can easily adopt as part of my everyday lifestyle so that I don't have to keep yo-yo'ing. Easier said then done. At the football game I was rather proud of myself, usually I will consume a bratwurst, garlic fries and lotsa beer (remember free beer in club level). This time I ordered a veggie burger and diet coke and I even held myself back when they brought out the mojitos (I will write a sonnet of my love for mojitos one day). One of my biggest problems in the past is that I splurge on special occasions and soon everyday becomes a special occasion for one reason or another. Lunch out with coworkers? Splurge! Hard day at work? Spurge! Finally Friday? Splurge! After a lot of thinking I have decided that the only days that count as splurge worthy are my birthday, fancy dinners paid by Dave's work, and holiday parties.

Other news, I am trying to convince Dave to let us extend our Lake Las Vegas vacation to encompass a night's stay at the Venetian since evidently 4 nights at the Ritz Carlton is not enough for me. I am having a hard time justifying my cause.

Didn't want it didn't need it but we knew that we could see it ...

I expected to come home from the car show with a long list of cars that I wanted to buy TOMORROW unfortunately that wasn't so. The good news is that Dave and I both found one vehicle we loved (and it was the same vehicle!) but the bad news is that for now the purchase price is not in our budget. For the $48,000 Lexus 400h we would need to put a down payment of $15k in order for our monthly payments to be $550 per month. With our income this is easily do-able but we're about to begin a kitchen remodel and the kitchen is more important then the SUV. *whine* Why can't I have both the new kitchen the 400h AND the Lexus IS250? Yes, I am a spoiled brat and yes the fact that I will have to wait to buy the 400h makes me extremely pouty and yes you can feel free to hate me for my pissy princess thoughts.

In slightly less shallow thoughts, when we bought this house 8 months ago we were convinced that we would be eating budget meals for the rest of our lives while we stretched our budget to afford a $450,000 house. Never did we think that in less then a year we'd be able to afford a contractor to remodel the kitchen but also be able to contemplate buying a new car soon after. It's amazing how things just have a way of working themselves out.

The Lexus IS250 which I love even more then the 400h but unfortunately is not as practical