Not Catholic.. Not from New Orleans.. But...

I'm not catholic nor am I from the Coast/New Orleans areas, but I still like to partially participate in the Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday.

This year my participation in each goes a little like this:

As we all know, I  love am obsessed with the idea of any type of themed party, so I could not let Fat Tuesday go by without a little celebration. We had a small New Orleans style supper at our house. I put on my green polo t-shirt with the purple horse and hung some Mardi Gras beads from the light fixture above our kitchen table and threw the rest in the bowl in the middle of the table. Kendol cooked Crawfish Etouffee and Stephanie brought down a King Cake!! Stephanie, of course, was festive along with me, in her purple and white striped shirt and purple, gold & green glitter top hat with a mask on the front!! I would say it was a success!!

As for Ash Wendesday, the first day of lent, I have decided to attempt giving up something, for the first time in my life. As I tried to decide what is was I wanted to give up, I came up with a few different things that I am going to attempt to give up/work on.

First of all, I am going to try and not eat chocolate for 40 days. Used to, this one would be simple bc I have never really been big on sweets, but these days I'm like the "cookie monster" of chocolate. If I see it, it's going in my mouth. And that's not good, when there is a candy bowl at the front desk of your office and a "Cups" downstairs for hot chocolate.

Secondly, I am going to try and cut off soft drinks all together. Last year I was successful with cutting out
cokes, but now I resort to Sprite. I only have one a day (maybe) during the week, so this should not be too hard.

Don't freak people who know I used to couldn't function without coke...I still have a coke occassionally (and by occassionally I mean maybe twice a month) but I would say that that is considered cutting out cokes for someone who used to drink 3 or 4 a day... at least.

Thirdly, I need to majorly cut back on bread. O my lordy, I eat so much bread. Notice, I said I am going to cut back not cut out. I believe it to be impossible to cut out bread all together bc let's face it... That would mean I could not have a piece of bread with my spaghetti, a sandwich of any kind, pizza, a sloppy joe, a hamburger, Beagle Bagel, a roll... I mean come on.. cutting out bread completely will never happen, but I am willing to attempt to cut back some.

And last but not least, I am going to get back hot and heavy in my workouts again!!

I will let you know how this all goes. I am going to go ahead and say it's going to be a complete disaster, but hey at least I set some goals in the first place. That's the first step, right??

As they say.. "It is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all."