Marriage and Diet

I have come to the sad conclusion that being married has completely ruined my healthy eating/healthy living pattern.  I am not a huge health-nut (unless you can count cupcakes, chocolate, and lots of candy as health food?), but I was always semi-conscious of what I was eating and tried to make healthy, low-cholesterol but tasty meals (with cupcakes in between) and went running on a regular basis.

 {Hubs eating his notoriously unhealthy snack with TWO sodas!}

My hubby has completely ruined this (is it fair to blame him?  probably not, but I'm going to anyway).  The running went straight downhill after he arrived because I wanted to spend time with him so I started leaving work a bit earlier which meant no more lunch-time runs.  Now that it's light out for a lot longer I thought for sure I'd start running again in the evenings after work.  Ummm, no.  Now I get home and want to hang out with him (or eat and watch tv) rather than go for a run.  So, since 1 Jan. I have officially run 8 miles.  Yeah, pretty pathetic.

And the eating is the worst.  Hubs likes fried food, fatty food, and Chinese food.  Our favorite Saturday morning breakfast?  Refried beans (with extra oil), fried plantains, fried eggs with TONS of butter (thank you mom for getting hubs addicted to these!), and cheese.  While my sister was gone we made steak and pork and fried fish and fried cheese!  My tummy is so confused (along with my pants which don't seem to fit anymore!).

It is not helpful that hubby has the metabolism of Michael Phelps and can eat three hotdogs (yes, he does and every day) and tons of fried food and not really change.  Very annoying.

Hmm, so how to overcome this little challenge?  Not sure - but unless I get a pay raise and can afford an entirely new (and larger) wardrobe something is going to have to change.  To start with I've limited myself to one sweet a day.  No more cupcakes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (I know, I'm a complete sugar addict) along with 7 pounds of chocolate right before bed.  That's goal number one.

Goal number 2?  I'm determined to start running again.  I love running and I hate that I've given up on it.  Just because I'm married doesn't mean I can't run.  I just have to fit it in a little better.  So, I'm working on that.  I am desperately trying to get motivated to go running this evening - I mean it's suppose to be beautiful outside, what better day to start my new *healthy* married life?

Or maybe I'll just eat chips and salsa when I get home - at least it's not a cupcake....

The results of our hard work

Hubby and I (or maybe just hubby, but since we are married now, I can take credit for things that he did, can't I??) happily finished all our home repairs just in time for my sister's return from Mexico.

I was a bit nervous about how things would turn out due to our deck incident, but after that day-of-a-hundred-trips-to-Home-Depot, we seemed to have gotten a hold of things and were problem free after that.  Oh, except for the fact that we continued to underestimate the amount of stuff we needed which resulted in many more trips to Home Depot - where everyone knows my name now.

So here is our beautiful new-looking deck:

Minus the fact that I can't seem to take a straight picture, look how beautiful it turned out.  We (and our neighbors) were pretty thrilled about the color and happy that we ended up not going with the red.  The deck looks brand new!  Ivan and I are most proud of this.  To be fair, he did ALL the work from bleaching the deck to painting every minute area of it - even those annoying sunburst railings.  He did an amazing job.  We enjoy just standing outside and admiring it.

Then, on Saturday, we decided to mulch and weed the garden.  No one in our house really knows anything about gardens.  Our yard is landscaped with plants that need pretty much no attention whatsoever.  But the grassy things were taking over so we trimmed them down.  There were also a ton of leaves from like 6 years ago that we raked away.  We then poured mulch all over the place and voila, a new garden.  Of course I bought three bags of mulch thinking it would be plenty and we ended up having to go back to Home Depot for four more bags - could I have been any more off with my estimation?? But Ivan did a great job with this too - I cut some of the grass and layed the mulch down on maybe 1/3 of the garden, so he didn't do it ALL alone (hey, I was super cleaning the house and cooking a steak dinner - it's not like he was working hard and I was taking a bubble bath or something).

Sorry for the dark photo but I leave for work soooooo early in the morning that it's not even light out yet.  But you can get the gist of things.  Yeah - our garden is nothing fancy - but the mulch looks great!

So, that was pretty much the result of our first three weeks of married life (the first week was our honeymoon though so it was a bit removed from reality).  We work well together.  It's kind of fun because Ivan likes to keep busy and work hard and do things so that makes me want to do the same.  I usually spent my weekends lazing around the house doing absolutely nothing and enjoying it.  However, these first few weekends we were so busy we barely had 5 minutes of free time and I loved it too.  I'm glad I now have someone to do things with and to motivate me to do things - it's refreshing.

Ivan brings out my good side and it's kinda nice.

Lucha Libre

{via}

Now, there are many thing that Ivan and I both enjoy - Chinese food (although him more than me), hammocks, eating, golfing, being outside, walking around the lake, etc. 

BUT - there is one thing (and many others I'm sure) that we DON"T AGREE on.  And currently, on the top of my list, is LUCHA LIBRE.

Last night Ivan was watching his favorite evening novela, Hasta Que el Dinero nos Separe, interspersed with some Lucha Libre. Then he proceeded to watch LL for the next hour.  This was American Lucha Libre though, aka WWE and RAW.  I am the opposite of a fan. 

I think I would even forgo a TV if only to avoid watching that ever again in my life.

Ugg, TV wars.  Too bad I'm not really into TV enough to put up a fight.  So I went to bed.  But it still annoyed me that he was watching it.

Just say no to deck staining...

First, here are a few more honeymoon pics (nope, still no wedding photos) from Hershey Garden:

 {don't mind his funny smile...}

Ahh, looking at those pics makes it seem like it all happened years ago - but we've only been married for two weeks.  Crazy!

It's been kinda nice having the house to ourselves (my sis and her family are on vacation for two weeks) as we've been able to act like a real married couple and pretend like the entire house is ours, not just the little tiny bedroom upstairs.

This weekend we worked on the deck and re-staining it.  Ivan likes to keep busy, so he's been anxiously waiting for the perfect opportunity to stain the deck, ever since our neighbors did it.  Well, it didn't go quite as smoothly as we thought but I was amazed at Ivan's patience and refusal to give up.  

On Saturday we headed to Home Depot to buy the stain.  We bought Redwood Solid Color deck stain and some paint brushes.  That day, while I was cooking, he was out there bleaching the deck to get rid of all the dirt and mold that was beginning to grow.  He also decided to bleach the patio downstairs and remove all the leaves from the back garden - I've never seen the backyard look so nice!

On Sunday, after Ivan's soccer game, we decided to get started on the staining part.  I say we, but really it was him.  So, we got one section of the deck painted and the neighbors thought it was too red and in violation of the housing association codes.  So, rather than continuing painting, we ask the housing association rep.  She says it's too red too.  

 

So, we go back to Home Depot, exchange the one can of stain that's not opened, get stain/paint stripper, some protective gear (like face mask and gloves), and a light cedar wood semi-transparent color.  

Unfortunately, the red doesn't come off (please note that if you decide to stain your deck red - it's impossible to remove) and the cedar wood color is not dark enough to paint over it (even though the Home Depot experts assured me it was - just like they assured me the red stain would easily be removed).  So, then I went BACK to Home Depot and exchanged the cedar wood stain for a chocolate solid color stain that would cover the left over red.  

By now it's 7pm and I have a headache from worrying about the stupid deck that isn't even mine, from spending almost $150 on stain, stain remover, stain tools, ect., and hoping that we didn't kill our plants with the horrendously hazardous stain remover.  However, rather than call it a day, Ivan headed out there with the new chocolate colored stain and proceeded to stain another section of the deck.

As of this evening - the plants are still alive (but I don't think they are out of the clear yet) and the deck color looks great.

Ivan working on the sunburst railing - isn't he doing

an awesome job!!

If you look at the floor of the deck you can see remenents

of the red color - luckily the brown easily covered it up

And I am so thankful that Ivan's my husband...and that we don't actually own a house.  An apartment sounds great...one without a deck that has to be stained...and maybe no homeowner association.

Mrs. Merlo? Mrs. Aguilera?? Mrs. Merlo Aguilera???

After all that planning, we finally tied the knot.  So this blog is now changing a bit.  Instead of being about wedding planning, it's gonna be about life after the wedding.  It's amazing the differences between us - his Honduran ideas and my American ones.  It makes for interesting converstaion and stories.  I love him dearly - but we don't always understand each other (and it's not always due to my Spanish skills).  

For instance, deciding on our name:

I am now Mrs. Merlo.  Or, Mrs. Aguilera.  Or Mrs. Merlo Aguilera.  Ok, so we haven't figured it out yet.  Hondurans generally have four names, Americans three.  What am I to do???  His first last name is Merlo, the more important one.  In the US they always use the last name in the long line of names - which would be Aguilera, the less important one.  He wants to be Merlo, but most people call him Aguilera.  How do I go about changing my name when we're not sure which name he's gonna end up with???

I've decided to wait.  I'll change my name after all his immigration forms go through and the US government has decided which name they'd like him to have.  I wish the US would get on board and have an easy solution to this problem - at least let us pick which name we want.

Ugg, what a pain.

But I do have some Honeymoon photos for you lovely people.  Wedding photos aren't back yet, but we snapped a few photos of us in Hershey, PA.

Our rose petal turn-down

Our romantic champagne and strawberries

Mini-golf tourney - he won, maybe it's 

because of how serious he's taking it....

At Chocolate World - lots of fun!

And of course - we had to find ourselves a big

Hershey Kiss!!!