Great week!

I feel like I have a laundry list of things to be happy and excited about this week:

1. "Let the Bright Seraphim" is playing on the radio right now. :-)

2. Lindt Excellence chocolate bars have been on sale at Walgreens this week - 2 for $3. Usually they're $2.50 at Walgreens, so I get them at Target where they're $2.19. But 2 for $3! Too bad they haven't had the 85% stuff all week. At least I've gotten to stock up on 70% and the dark chocolate with chili!

3. My trip up to Milwaukee on Sunday was so nice. I had fantastic luck weather wise - I was worried about getting caught up in snow, but missed it by a few hours. My driving was clear, but by Monday morning Milwaukee had gotten about a foot of the stuff. I also loved the opera I went up to see. Even more, I loved seeing a few old friends. The added bonus was getting to stop at Alterra, my favorite coffee roasting place. I only bought 3 pounds and hopefully the stuff I bought is stored well enough that it'll stay fresh. Maybe I'll have to look into mail-ordering it in the future.

4. Monday in Chicago was in the low 20s. Yesterday it got to be over 60. Today will be the same!

5. Great news on the cholesterol front, but first a little background: I've always had high cholesterol, even as a kid. When we were little (I was probably around 10) the health insurance company made all of us Rill kids see a dietitian because our cholesterol was so high. We all thought it was dumb because she was holding up plastic food like peas, bread, Cheerios, etc., and asking us how often we ate those foods vs. the non-plastic version of chocolate bars and Cheetos. We all kind of went, "duh, we have vegetables every night, and we only get chocolate after Halloween and Christmas, but then we only get 1 piece a day." Turns out the only recommendations she could make were switching to skim vs. 2% milk, and having cholesterol free bread.

Anyway, I was at a Blue Cross Blue Shield event yesterday, and they were doing free biometric screenings, which included cholesterol tests. I took advantage of it because it was a finger prick vs. a full draw, and I'm really glad I did. My total # is 226, which is actually down 9 points from 1 1/5 years ago, but I learned that my HDL is 75 (HDL is the good kind: h=happy cholesterol). When the guy explained this he said that you want an HDL number over 40, and a good range is 40-60. That mine's that much higher is great, because it also brings the overall ratio down to 3.0, and you want a ratio that's 4 or less. Hooray.

Sorry, I know that last thing might be dumb, but I'm ecstatic. This is something I've been really worried about for about the past year and a half when I learned I was still over 200 after not having been on hormonal birth control for almost a year.

Ok, good enough for now - hope everyone has a beautiful weekend!