Tammy Tutterow

Up and around-

I just thought I would post quickly and let everyone know that things went well yesterday.  I seriously spent the last 24 hours asleep thanks to Vicadin.  Oh my goodness did this one hurt, I think worse than my gallbladder removal!!  Tylenol seems to be working fine for the pain today which is just a fraction of what it was yesterday.  I *think* all of my problem parts have been worked on and that I won't be going under the knife again any time soon.  {knocking on wood}

Back under the knife-

In a couple of hours I am heading to the hospital to have surgery again, for the second time in two weeks.  This time it is for a pretty routine female kind of thing.  I should be done and at home by mid afternoon if all goes well.  I actually had this scheduled since before I knew for sure that I would be getting my gallbladder out.  I figured they would have me reschedule, but they said it would be okay.  So by the end of the day I will have at least two more holes in my belly. In a few days when I have gotten past this latest surgery, I plan to lace up my tennies and hit the gym.  Lately I have been longing to exercise.  It is such a wierd feeling for me.  I am fairly confident that I have NEVER wanted to exercise, ever.  I generally just don't like it.  Actually, even in the past when I was pretty regular about it, I hated it.  I hated being sweaty.  I hated how red and flushed my face would get.  Lately though I find myself just wanting to do it, to get moving, to run even.  Weird.  I am chalking it up to finally feeling good after feeling so cruddy for so long.  I think too it is how good smaller pants feel. . . smaller pants that are comfortable even.  I like it and want to keep that feeling. My gratitude for today is for smaller jeans that are comfy.  You gotta love when your comfy pants are your jeans and not just your sweat pants.

Pink Paislee sneak peeks!

If you haven't been by the Pink Paislee blog yet, you must!  Everyday Rebecca is revealing a new sneak peek of the products being launched next month at CHA.  It is just one scrappy delight after another. You can find them here: Pink Paislee blog

I ' ve fallen. . .

off the blog wagon and having a tough time getting back on! I was doing so good too.  So what happened? I got super busy trying to finish up a huge to-do list of things I wanted to get done during my surgery "vacation".  The good news is I did knock out a bunch of it.  Add in trying to get my sleep cycle back on track for going back to work (I am on 12 hour nights right now) and well, I just have gotten way out of any kind of routine. Some of the things I accomplished in my absense are:

• I finished my assignments for the BasicGrey booth for CHA, got them boxed up and shipped off.  I love the things I created for them and can't wait to share them here.
• I re-arranged my scraproom and did some major purging.
• I dug out my stack of smaller pants from the back of my closet.  I am now down 17 pounds which has made smaller pants necessary.  It feels so good to finally be losing some weight.  I am really motivated by this loss and am going to keep the momentum up.
• I found my new favorite shampoo.  It smells like orange sherbet and makes my hair so soft.  Love it!
• 
• I replaced ALL of my make-up with Bare Escentuals.
• I found my new favorite clear nail polish, which is making my nails so strong.
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• I got a slew of things done for HHS.  I still have a ton more to do, but I think I am making some progress on my to-do list.
• Even though I didn't journal it here, I still made time to think each day about being grateful.

 

One year.

I think that one year seems to be the final closure for me. If it's a new thing, after one year it isn't new anymore. If it is an event, then one year makes it old news. That's kinda how it feels now that we have been back in the house for a full year today. It hasn't really been an issue for a while now, but one year later for me closes the book completely.

D

Have you ever

finished a project and just loved it so much that you wanted to jump up and down and yell "look what I made, look what I made!"? Or maybe you look at it and feel a little surprised that YOU made it? That is how I feel right now! I just finished one of my CHA assignments for BasicGrey and am so in love with it. I can't wait until I can post a photo of it because I think it might be one of my most favorite creations ever. Since I have been trying to post more photos, I will share something, more photos of my frivolities. These are my Tammy dolls. Yup, she really is named Tammy. Back in the early days of Barbie, Ideal introduced Tammy in 1962 to compete with Barbie. Parents loved Tammy because she was a bit more realistic than Barbie, a little more "full bodied". But alas, Tammy lost out to the hipper, thinner, blonder Barbie and she was discontinued. I found an online article that described it like this, "If Barbie was the most popular girl in school, Tammy must have been the girl next door that no one ever noticed. A little taller, with less of an hourglass figure and a fashion sense more sporty than glamorous, Ideal's Tammy doll never quite became the instant hit that Mattel's Barbie became with little girls in the 1960s." One of these days I need to track down a "Bud" doll, Tammy's boyfriend. I think my Tammys would appreciate a Bud. {sigh} There is a terrible parallel in there to this real life Tammy. Anna was looking at the Tammys the other day and decided that I resemble the Tammy doll. Nice, thick legs and rosacea rosey cheeks. Thanks Anna. In addition to Tammy dolls, I also have some things about the Tammy movies. There were a whole series of them starting Sandra Dee and Debbie Reynolds as Tammy. The first one introduced Tammy as a backwoods hillbilly girl who saves a young pilot when his plane crashes in the swamp. When her granpa, who she lives with on a shanty boat, goes to jail for moon shining, Tammy goes to the city to stay with the handsome young pilot. Nice. Couldn't my namesake movie character be something better than a hillbilly with a moon shining pappy? The song from the movie, "Tammy" sung by Debbie Reynolds. My mom always loved the song and chose my name from it. I was actually named for the song. Someday I should play the record and actually hear what the song sounds. Okay, so for today's gratitude. . . Today I had a wonderful day sitting in my scrappy room playing with paper and glue all day long. Scrappy days, just make me so happy.

Friday-

I am going to seem like a complete blog copycat, but oh well.  Holly posted about Sally Jean charms today and it reminded me that I hadn't checked out Sally Jean's site in a while.  I own, um, a "few" Sally Jean charms and love them so much.  They are true mini works of art.  I have a white tree in my scrap room that looks like a Christmas tree but is soft like stuffed animal fur.  I hang my Sally Jeans on it with bits of Hanah hand dyed silk ribbon, another of my very favorite things.  So I went over to Sally Jean to see what is new and {gasp} I am in heaven!  The Valentine collection has been released. I love stuff with hearts and so this is the perfect time of year for me with all of the Valentine things coming out.  I think my biggest problem is what to choose because I seriously love them all!  If you have never been to Sally Jean's site, you must, you won't be sorry.  It is a pure visual treat. Today I spent the whole day working on Heart In Hand stuff.  We added two new new classes to the site today.  On the scrappy front, I am busy working on assignments for CHA next month.  Everything is top secret so I can't share any pictures of what I am working on. Lest I forget, I need to be grateful today.  Today I think I shall be grateful for all of my frivilous little things that bring me such joy, like my furry tree with little works of art dangling from it.

Thursday?

  Isn't it funny how you lose track of what day of the week it is when you are off of work?  Today is Thursday, right? Today I got this cute candy bouquet from the girls at my work.  Wasn't that so sweet of them?!  As a weird coincidence, they contacted Candid Gift Designs to order it for me.  CGD happens to be my owned by my sister-in-law Melissa, so my sweet treat was delivered by one of my favorite people.  That bouquet brings me to my gratitude for today, for sweet reminders of friendship and care.  Thanks you guys, I love my bouquet and am so touched that you thought of me. I am so thrilled to report that I ate like a normal person today!  Wohoo!  Seriously, I think it is the first time in months that something I ate didn't make me sick.  I am still being very cautious, but I actually had a meal tonight rather than a few bites here and there to help carry me through.  I may never eat jello again!!  So far I am down almost 20 pounds.  I am not sure where it is missing from (as I am still quite pudgy) but the scale says 18.5 as of this morning.  I have some metablolic issues (seriously, I am a mess) that makes it very hard to lose weight.  I am all about silver linings, so that is it from the whole gallbladder mess, that because of it I finally lost some weight.  So while I am still a little scared to find out what I can and can't eat I am also scared that I am going to gain the weight back.  I really want to build on that loss and lose more which will mean exercising once I am cleared to.  I am not a big exerciser so that is going to take some motivation.

Gratitude for today and a little bit of rambling-

First thing I want to share is my gratitude for today because I don't want it to get lost in what will surely be a long bit of rambling. . . I am grateful today for good friends. Friends who will let you cry and feel a bit sorry for yourself and listen as you have a pity party. Friends who say the right things and help lift you back up again and help you regain the right perspective. Thank you H- So I guess that has you curious what I was so in the dumps about, huh? In December my term on the Prima design team came to an end. I loved being on that team so I decided to apply again. I was really hopeful that I would be selected again. They announced the new team today and it didn't include me. I was crushed. I don't normally take not making a team so hard, heck I have applied for tons of them and not been selected, but I really did want this one. I like to think that things always happen for a reason and that they happen the way they do for the best, but this morning I couldn't see it. Maybe it was because I have been sick and not recovering as well as I had hoped for, maybe I am just wore down from surgery, I don't know, but I cried over it. Yup, I hate to admit it, but I cried over not making that team. Ugh! I hate admitting it. I feel like a sore loser for admitting it. I know that I don't need validation for my work, I like what I do- how and what I create, I really do. At the end of the day, that is what matters, that I created something I liked and that the process brought me joy. I don't need the title of being on a design team to tell me that. But today, for just a little bit, I lost sight of that joy and took the opinions of others a little too personally. That is where an email conversation with a friend came in. I suppose having a good cry and pity party over something frivolous is okay sometimes, just as long as you have it real quick and get back to the business at hand. And that is what I did. After all of that drama, I jumped in the shower for a super long, super hot shower. A hot steamy shower always help me feel better when I am all weepy like that. As I was scrubbing at the orange Betadine Paint STILL on my belly (after 5 days!!) I got to thinking about an unfortunate incident in the mid 80's. I am a very fair skinned person. My mom is red headed and I have been very lucky (?) to inherit her complexion. Some people have jokingly told me I lack pigment. I just don't tan, I freckle. I am okay with it now, but in my early teens, I wanted to be tan, which led to an unfortunate experience with a bottle of QT. Now I know that sunless tanners are the rage now and supposedly look really good, but in the early 80's, a bottle of QT was like iodine in a lotion. I was desperate though. I had failed at countless tanning attempts that included (brace yourself) rubbing melted Crisco on myself while laying out on a silver plastic tanning sheet. Picture if you will chicken frying. Anyway, on my complexion, QT gave me the appearance of having swam in a tub of iodine. Not pretty. The sad thing was, at first I thought it looked pretty good, well until I sweated and it ran. So anyway, today, showering and looking at my still orange belly gave me a flashback of that summer when I was orange and proud and donned a mini skirt to show off my rockin' tan. Speaking of skin color, check out my lovely green hand (see above). It doesn't look too green in the photo, but in person it is GREEN with lovely shades of purple and so much more impressive. Emma was quite fascinated by it earlier and was very proud to point out that it matched my green t-shirt today. Finally, I have color!

Gratitude for Tuesday-

I know he already got a nod this week for being such a good caregiver, but I have to give another gratitude shout-out to my hubby David.  He has completely spoiled me today and waited on me hand and foot.  Everytime I called he came right away and did whatever I asked of him.  Today I am very grateful that I have such a wonderful husband, friend, and soul mate.  I am grateful to have found him and his love.