My Birthday Weekend! and getting back on plan.

It was my birthday this weekend just past, and so this post will have loads of pictures. 

I was off this weekend, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. It was great. Saturday was spent lounging about the house, then going to the cinema with Gavin to see Inception (brilliant movie, and i usually hate films with so much hype, the addition of my old sweetheart Leo and my new sweetie Cillian probably helped too.) and then to my parents house where there was a sort of party with my parents, sister, her boyf, brother, cousin and gav obviously. It was brilliant.

I then went home and got some pressies:

It was a bit of a buffy themed birthday. Gav painted me this Spike picture. Isn't it awesome?

I also got a load of the season eight graphic novels and a tablet for my laptop!!! which I'm doing quite a bit of this post with!!!

Sunday morning was the first day of our holiday in Newcastle, county Down.

First stop was Dundrum for a carboot sale. We got this neat wee Coke sign and a crystal ship in a bottle, which I don't seem to have taken a picture of, that's not like me. I'll stick it in at a later post. I do have quite the collection of ships in bottles these days.

This was the Slieve Donard as we walked to it.

We went for some lunch and general Newcastle stuff and got to see a line of minis drive down the main street, then we went to the swans

gav became fixated with stalking the duckies.

the weather was crazy with it's rain and oddly bright sunshine.

We went back to the hotel and got ready for my birthday, here's me in my birthday dress, flash over my face.

And we went for indian food. It was amazing., But I nearly killed Gavin with one of my chillis. I thought he was going to cry at one point, but we went and got ice cream after to try make it better.

The next day? more rain. Our hotel room was beautiful. It was one of the bays you can see from the front of the hotel with six windows, if you lay on the bed, the four windows you can look out comfortably all you can see is the sea. It's like there's nothing else around for miles. it's lovely.

And then from the other windows you can see the whole length of Newcastle and the coast.

Amusements! We won two voodoo doll key rings :)

A picture of me in rain, with my sunglasses and polka dots.

Followed by floating about in the spa in the hotel.

And then I got my seaweed bath (another part of my birthday present)

The weather seemed to pick up after that so I took a few pictures of the walk to our dinner reservations in the Percy French.

Fishcake starter

and our mains

I had venison. It was lovely.

and then a wee walk by the beach front

Back to the hotel room where I got birthday muffin!!!

The next morning was the last day in the hotel. Sad. But it was also our activity day in Castlewellan!

Our first stop was the Castlewellan peace maze. Which is (I think) either the largest or second largest maze in the world. We were in it for ages. I kept trying to take pictures from a height to try and map my way out, but I failed. So many deadends and circles. Grr.

We then had an hour and a half of archery, really really fun. I'm awesome at it as well by the way.

And then we did some canoeing, on this lake, didn't take my phone with me to get pictures in case it got soaked, again really fun, just me and Gav in the canoe, to be honest I was a bit irratated by the other group with us. But that's probably the over competitive streak in me.

Then some photos about the Castlewellan forest park before making our way back to the hotel in Newcastle to get our cases and then head on home.

 

Getting back to weightwatchers, I think it can be fairly said that I had a very indulgent weekend. But I don't really mind, 'cus I have gotten very far with the plan and entitled to some fun, and I really enjoyed it. And it was my birthday.

As I said last time I'm continuing to weigh myself at home on my own scales. However I won't be giving numbers here because I like to stick to the official ones. I have however gained according to my own scales. And I'm hoping that this week I can manage to take myself back down to the point I was last time I was at a weigh-in all those weeks ago.

I think I've let myself hit a plateau, because for a good two weeks there I wasn't really tracking the way I normally do and I think I hit a pretty good maintainance weight. But from coming home I've put myself right back on plan! I've been pre-tracking which has allowed myself more control on my points and I know I tend to do better the weeks my exercise is structured, so I'm back to using the #getrunning app on the ipod touch / iphone. It's a brilliant wee app that works fantastic, when I stick to it. And I will this time. I normally get to about week 5 or 6 then stop, but very determined this time to complete the program. So far I've finished week one. So it's still early days yet.

I don't think I mentioned it here yet but I got a new phone as a graduation / birthday pressie. It's the new HTC Wildfire, and my new love. Having used over the last year or so the ios3 and symbian platforms, i really need to tell you all, androids a operating system is superior. I've never had such a brilliant phone in my life.

And as far as planning goes, I found some brilliant wee apps for weightwatchers.my two favourites being WWCalcuUK as a generic quick calculator and WWdiary as a really good wee tracker, both of which are free, which instantly makes things better. If anyone has any other or better suggestions, weightwatchers or otherwise, do get in contact. I do quite love my apps.

Tomorrow is my weigh-in and I am very nervous over what it will tell me. You'll be guaranteed the next post tomorrow night after it though as I think I'll be at home on my own. So lets see if sticking to 18 points a day (thus saving 4 each day, 4x7=28 points saved in the week) and earning 18 activity points in the week (28+18=46) will enable me to manage a loss this week. (can you tell I like math?)

Til tomorrow!!!