So, we are planning to spend a week in Paris and another week traveling around the rest of France for our honeymoon! I took French all four years in high school and was really good at it (I won prizes! I was a language nerd!), but it’s been………ahem………….eleven years since I was in high school, and I’m afraid I’m more than a little bit rusty. ;)

My vocab at the moment is basically back to the ‘Hi, how are you, my name is ______, the car is blue, nice doggie, a cup of coffee please,’ etc level, and I’d like to improve it before we go on our trip just in case we have to ask or answer any questions that don’t involve, you know, coffee, blue cars, or doggies? Ha ha. Mike speaks no French, so I’m the official trip interpreter (and my inner language nerd rejoices!), but I am going to need some help.

I wish I could afford the Rosetta Stone packages, but they’re just out of the budget at the moment. Does anyone out there know of any decent, FREE language learning resources online? Podcasts or audio lessons would be especially helpful, since it’s my listening/speaking comprehension that needs the most work…….but really, anything will do! Thanks!! :)

[ WEDDING RINGS // MAY 2009 ]

hello.

remember me? ;)



[ new posts coming soon. ]

HELP ME...................................

which?...................................and why? never mind price for now (i could potentially possibly afford any of these, although some are, shall we say, much more affordable than others).

so, we had our wedding tasting this afternoon! and of course, i meant to bring my camera along to the tasting and forgot it, but they were nice enough to pack up some extras for us to take with us at the end, so i photographed them once we got home--they gave us a whole box full of cheese! a Whole. Box. Full. Of. Cheese. miraculous!! ;)

our menu is as follows:

domestic cheese display [with fruit, crackers & fresh bread]......that's the box 'o' cheese seen above

farmer's market salad

spinach and fontina stuffed chicken breast

rosemary grilled salmon with frizzled leeks and lemon-chive beurre blanc

creamy parmesan potatoes

roasted garden vegetables

mmmmmmmmmmm.........i know what i'm having for dinner tonight. :)

and because i love you...........or because i meant to post these weeks ago when they first arrived, ha ha......here are the 'save the date' magnets.........................................

we are at day 2 of the 'lose weight by the wedding' plan! mike and i are giving in to the pressure of the glossy bridal magazines just a little and trying to, as they would say, 'slim down and tone up before the big day, OMG!!'. i can't believe we are such sellouts [ha ha], but who doesn't want to look nice in their photos? everyone does, right?

as luck would have it, we have been given 24 free days at a local gym [started yesterday], so with only eight months to go--i can't believe it!!!--now seems to be the right time. we have cut out alcohol entirely for the near future [i never drink liquor or beer anyway, but to give up my beloved glasses of wine with dinner, ohhh....sniff. sniff! sigh.], very limited consumption of meat [only twice a week in ANY form, whether it's a chicken breast or just one piece of bacon, it counts], and of course the aforementioned gym exercise.

here is where i run into trouble, though: i have never been much of a calorie counter girl, i'm not one of those types who can tell you exactly how many calories are in a grape or a cup of coffee or a hamburger, and so on. i would really like to start keeping an eye on what i'm eating in terms of portion size and amounts of calories, fat, etc, but...................we cook almost all of our food at home! for instance, for lunch today, i will probably eat a small bowl of the vegetarian chili i made last night for dinner. i know it's quite low in fat [only a dash of olive oil!] and high in fiber [beans, wonderful beans]. but i haven't a clue how many calories might be in it, or what constitutes an appropriate serving! i could spend all day on the online calorie counter websites, looking up every ingredient i cook with and doing complex fractions, but strangely, this sounds unappealing! ha ha. is there a simpler way to do this? perhaps a cheat-y, rule-of-thumb type strategy to make sure i'm eating enough to survive but losing weight? this is all such a mystery to me.................