When I was a college kid and just starting my driving career, my father, who’s 83 years old and still driving, gave me excellent advice (for winter driving and for life in general). He told me, “Kiddo, you can deal with almost anything as long as you’re prepared.” It’s advice I took to heart, and it’s served me well over the 20 years I’ve been driving. In this article I’m going to share with you some of the tips I follow when I’m getting ready for another season of winter driving.

First, you have to set aside some time to prepare your car for winter driving. Pick a day where you can take a half hour to make a list of what you’re going to need to prepare for the winter.

You also need to prepare your car for bad weather. You want to make sure that your vehicle is in good condition and has the essential equipment to deal with ice, snow, and more. Make sure that your car has:

• A recent checkup. Have the mechanic check everything over, and recommend any necessary fixes before the snow flies.
• Good tires. They don’t have to be brand new, but you don’t want them to be bald either!
• New wipers. These are a relatively low cost item that will be a big help when there’s freezing rain and snow.
• Fluids topped off. The last thing you want to worry about when you’re crawling through blinding snow at 5 mph on the interstate is an overheating engine, or an icing windshield. Make sure your oil, transmission fluid, and wiper fluid are all full.
• A snow scraper. No, your mitten is not a sufficient substitute, Get one that’s sturdy and has a nice long handle – don’t bother with the gadgety ones that plug into your lighter. You just want to be able to scrape off the snow and ice when it’s building up.

Now that your car is taken care of, let’s make sure you have what you need to be safe. Get a duffel bag, a small storage bin, or some other storage container (use plastic so it’s waterproof) and pack it with the following items:

• A flashlight and extra batteries. If you have to get out of your car for any reason in the dark, you’ll be grateful to have one. And make sure the batteries are new! If you can get the kind designed to flash as well (check auto parts stores or a big box store).
• A fleece blanket (two or three if you have room).
• Several bottles of water.
• At least one set of gloves, scarf, and hat (for passengers who don’t bring theirs, or for you when you forget yours) in case you have to get out of the car in the snow.
• Road flares and a set of matches in a waterproof bag.
• A small first aid kit.
• A box of granola bars, energy bars, or some other nonperishable snack.
• A waterproof marker and some paper (in case you have to leave a note on your dashboard).
• Pieces of reflective material and bright material (you want items that work both in daytime and at night).
• String or twine and scissors.

Following these guidelines won’t guarantee that you’ll never experience problems or accidents while driving in bad weather, but they WILL ensure that, if you do, you’ll be better prepared for them. Have a safe winter!

(I wrote this blog post while participating in the SocialMoms and Esurance blogging program for 8,000 My SocialMoms Rewards Points. For more information on how you can participate, click here.)

So in honor of that, I thought I’d write a post today about what rituals we as a family celebrate with, and what rituals I personally observe (that’s a much smaller list, but it’s there):

Decorating

We (actually, I) have some “rules” I like to follow when it comes to decorating (although there have been times I’ve had to adapt them). We get the tree on the weekend before Christmas (this year we’re getting it a week earlier because of scheduling issues). The kid and hubs go to a local tree farm and cut it down themselves, and we decorate it that night (Christmas music and cookies are a must). Certain decorations always go on the tree, including the little plastic angels (which must be 40 years old, I imagine) from my parents’ tree; I remember decorating the tree with them when I was little. And don’t even think about suggesting a fake tree, or you’ll risk losing Christmas cookie privileges for the month!

And on the 1st of December, it’s time to decorate the house for the holidays. Some years it happens a bit later, but it can’t happen before the 1st, because the holiday season at our house doesn’t begin until then. Like the tree, some decorations have to go up, including the little ceramic nativity set and the plastic light-up Santa from my childhood.

Celebrations

For decades, Bunker Hubby’s parents held a Christmas Eve party that was tons of fun. When his parents passed, we took over, and we’re now in our 2nd year of hosting it. It’s a lot of work, especially considering that we also host Christmas dinner, but it’s totally, totally worth it! It’s a holiday party without the usual holiday issues – no having to buy gifts, no worrying about who’s going to have to sit next to obnoxious Uncle Fred, no pretending to eat Aunt Jean’s awful jello pudding. It’s potluck, too, which means you know there’s always going to be at least one dish you want to eat, and no one is stuck in the kitchen for hours making food. Basically, it’s good food, good drinks, good music, and lots of folks just letting loose.

Food

We do a few things every year – combined with a few new things. This year I’m making Christmas pudding for the first time; if it turns out to be worth it (it’s a little time-consuming to make, so the taste is gonna have to be pretty good!) I’ll add it into the holiday rituals. I also make the same cutout cookies with Bunker Monkey that I made with my sister when I was little (thanks, Betty Crocker cookbook!), and we get the Monkey a chocolate Advent calendar so he can count down the days to Christmas. A few years ago, I also started making a special dessert for my celiac brother-in-law that has become quite popular, so I make it for everyone now. We also try new stuff every year that doesn’t always make it into the “rotation”; the goose I made one year was delicious, but no one else likes goose in my extended family, so I won’t make it again. And the Italian Christmas cookies I made a couple of years ago are too much work to make every year, but I still make them every once in a while as a treat.

Special Events

We do a few things every year to celebrate Christmas – we visit the local “Lights in the Park” holiday display, we watch the same holiday movies (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Peanuts Christmas movie for the kid, White Christmas and the Ref – among others – for mom), and I do some things that remind me of Christmases at my parents’ house, like writing Christmas cards and driving around to look at the holiday lights on folks’ houses.

Those are our holiday traditions – we’d love to hear about yours, so share them with us in the comments!

This year, he’s gotten into Super Mario Bros. Easy, right? They even make Mario and Luigi costumes. Oh, if only it were that easy; but no, my child doesn’t want to be Mario or Luigi. No – he wants to be this:

Yeah, this was gonna be a challenge.

So how did we do it (because we did it, oh yes, we did)? Well, let’s break this down into its components. There are:

A big purple shell
A yellow/orange body
A pink head
Pink sunglasses
Studded black cuffs
Claw feet
Metal wand with a black ball on it

The Shell

This was the biggest challenge. Fortunately, we had a source for material that made this project possible: Synthetic casting tape (we used the 4″ tape). It’s essentially a bandage that’s impregnated with substances that cause it to harden within minutes of contact with air. Vets use this stuff on animals because it doesn’t require the animal to stay still for very long. The way we created the shape was to take a couple of wire hangers and pull them out until they were oval-ish in shape, and put them over the top of a small (about 1 1/2-foot diameter) exercise ball (we had to tape the hangers down, because otherwise they would have fallen off). The hangers extended out around the ball and created the edge of the shell. We then laid the bandage strips over the ball, wrapping the edges of the bandages under the hangars (the hangars stayed in the shell), working from the top of the shell down. When the shell was a good thickness, we painted the shell with purple latex paint. This is what we got:

We created the spikes on the shell by forming more of the casting material into cones; we’ll be spray painting them white and attaching them to the shell with glue. Cost: Free (we had the paint, and we got the casting material for free from my sister-in-law).

The Body

This was easy: We just bought a long sleeved t-shirt and a pair of leggings in yellow-orange (actually, mom messed up and got them in pumpkin orange, but the boy decided he liked that better, so we kept them). Cost: $10 for t-shirt and leggings.

The Pink Head

This one was surprisingly hard to find; I knew I wanted a pink do-rag, but NO ONE had them so I bought a white one and some Rit dye from the craft store, and dyed it myself. Cost: $6 for dye and kerchief.

The Pink Sunglasses

Another one that was surprisingly hard to find; we finally found them in a Claire’s Accessories store, of all places. Cost: $6.

Studded Black Cuffs

These were also hard to find. We finally found these in the same Claire’s as the sunglasses. Cost: $10 for the two.

Claw Feet

I made these by cutting out feet shapes from orange foam, gluing little yellow triangles on the edges (for the claws) and velcro-ing the whole thing onto his sneakers. Cost: $2 for two packages of foam; we had the velcro.

Metal Wand

This was a toughie; the wand is somewhat cone-shaped though, so I got a large styrofoam cone from the craft store and a styrofoam ball to go on top. I cut a piece off the bottom of the cone to shorten it up a bit, then drilled out the bottom to make a hole in it for the wand handle. I used a thick wooden dowel (about 1″ diameter) for the handle and I painted the cone and the handle silver. The ball I painted black, and then I used a paring knife to dig out a hole in the cone for the ball. I used a toothpick inserted into the cone and ball to hold them together, and craft glue to attach the cone to the wand handle. Cost: $12 for the two foam pieces; the dowel was “found” by the husband. Here’s how it looks:

That’s it! As soon as all the pieces are completed (we need to attach the spikes to the shell, and cut the dowel) I’ll post a picture of the boy in costume. Phew!

A few weeks ago, I told you about a fundraiser we’re doing here at Notes From the Bunker. Because October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and because I got tired of seeing all the pointless “post your bra color to raise breast cancer awareness” stuff I was seeing on Facebook and Twitter, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and do a fundraiser for The Breast Cancer Research Foundation ( a great organization that does something tangible and real to fight breast cancer).

It’s a great cause, but we know that’s not enough to get people to donate their hard-earned money in this tough economy. So we came up with a little…incentive:

Women in bras.

That’s right, if we raise $1000 by November 1, we’ll post pictures of (as of this writing, though the number might increase) seven well-known Twitter folks and bloggers (and believe me, these are some smokin’-hot ladies). Our list thus far includes:

1. @StarryBlonde21
2. Rachael Acklin
3. @RightGirl
4. @PandaDementia
5. @Bekcaboo
6. @DaNanner 
7. Me!

…..

I’ve been pretty lucky in my life to not have fallen victim to too many destructive habits. I never picked up smoking (although I did play at it for a few days back in grad school, to fit in with some out-of-town friends). I drink, and have been drunk many times, but I’ve never become an alcoholic. And I never developed any really bad eating habits – I have the typically American vices of eating fast food a couple of times a month, and probably not eating as many veggies as I should, but I don’t have the kind of relationship with food that Lifetime creates movies-of-the-week about.

I tell you all this so that you understand why I’ve never really “had” to quit anything before. No hitting bottom, no rehab, no appearances on a reality show; nothing that would force me to give something up before it killed me. As a result, whenever I have tried to change a behavior, it’s never had a life-or-death urgency to it. Which is a good thing, because my approach to change is what coud be described as “unproductive”, to put it mildly.

All-or-nothing, baby. Balls to the wall.

While this is a good approach when you’re quitting a controlled substance that could kill you (and perhaps not even then; research on addictions shows that no one approach works for everyone), it’s perhaps less effective when you’re trying to, say, change your eating habits or start exercising.

The reason this approach often doesn’t work is because humans – and real life – just don’t work that way. We try something new, stick with it for a few days, and then might slack a bit. We start an exercise plan, for example, and a week in are waylaid by a business trip to a hotel without an exercise room. Or we try to go vegetarian, and our sister’s barbecue-themed wedding is too strong a temptation to resist.

The healthy response to this, as anyone well-versed in creating effective change will tell you, is to dust yourself off and get back on the horse. The “all-or-nothing” approach, though, tells you that if you experience a setback, you give up. Can’t hack it? Can’t do it 100%, 24-7? Give up. Go back to your sedentary, fast-food-and-soda chugging lifestyle. Leave change to the pros, or at least to those who have the willpower to do it right. You suck.

Yeah, that’s my internal monologue in a nutshell.

So I’m finding that two weeks into The Primal Blueprint 30-Day Challenge, my biggest lesson hasn’t been how to eat more Paleo, or eat healthier, or even how to substitute low-carb foods for my beloved fast food. No, it’s been a confirmation of a lesson I had yet to learn: That it doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. That I’m still eating healthy if I have some cheese at a wine tasting. Or if I make some cornbread because I’m sick and need some comfort food (like tonight). Or even if, God help me, I have a Pepsi while I’m out shopping.

It’s been a tough lesson to learn, make no mistake – and one that my brain still fights. I suspect I’ll never kick the “that ice cream cone means you’ve failed!” mentality, but there’s a part of my brain that’s fighting that and getting stronger by the day, that says, “You’re still okay if you have a piece of pie with dinner.” Because all-or-nothing is actually failure – it guarantees that, when I do something that I shouldn’t (and let’s be honest, it’s going to happen to 99% of us at some point or another), I’m going to give up on it completely. I’m going to fail.

It’s an approach that’s sort of illogical, at first glance – that accepting failure makes you more likely to succeed. But by accepting those “minor” failures, I stay on the path. Eating a doughnut is just a blip in an otherwise pretty good diet, not an excuse to give up. By accepting minor setbacks – and really, I don’t see them as setbacks, but as slight variations in a mostly healthy diet – I guarantee my success. Seeing a piece of cheese as an excuse to give up is the real failure.

Because failure only happens when you stop trying.

Remember, the goal is $1000 raised for The Breast Cancer Research Foundation – that’s not very much, if you think of it as 40 folks donating $25 each. Once the fundraiser starts, we’ll post daily on the progress. So make sure you check back here October 1, and spread the word!!

So Wednesday started out with protein: Eggs and bacon. My mood has been increasing, I’ve noticed, and my energy as well (though that might be because I’ve been getting to bed earlier than the typical 2am). Two big changes I’m seeing are my grain cravings reducing (I’m now craving protein, which is a very good change in my book) and my body shape is changing. The tummy I can’t seem to get rid of has been disappearing slowly – and if anything will convince me to get rid of grains, that’s a damn sure way to do (appealing to my vanity is always a great strategy).

Thursday was better than Wednesday – my energy is better, my grain cravings are much less; although I still have some, they’re not as powerful as they used to be. I went grocery-shopping today, and got only 3 non-paleo items, all of which are for the Bunker Monkey (he’s not paleo). Dinner tonight was a couple of sandwich steaks (they’re super-thin steaks you pan-fry for just a few minutes), sauteed bok choy in butter, and cucumber salad. I’m sure I’ll have a snack later, because that’s how I seem to be going lately – and it’ll probably be something sweet. But now I have options: No-sugar-added applesauce, no-sugar-added sliced peaches, dark chocolate, all-natural gelato, almond butter on apples, etc. My sugar cravings seem to come on in the evening, but they’re nothing I can’t control. I’m actually looking for ward to the rest of this challenge, which isn’t something I could say last week.

Just don’t ask about how the exercise component is going – it’s not. No workouts this week at all yet, but I’m hoping to get a run in tomorrow (Friday). We’ll see how it goes – and feel free to yell at me in the comments for my slacker-hood.

Today is the second day of the Primal Blueprint 30-day Challenge; as promised, I’ll try to keep somewhat of a journal for every day. Here’s the progress so far:

STATS:

Height: 5’5″ (for reference)

Weight: 131.0 I’d like to get this down at least 5 pounds, ideally 8

Waist: 32″ I’d like to knock a good 3 inches off here; I have no doubt I can get at least that much off, because cutting grains always has a significant impact on my waistline

Hips: 37″ I’d like to knock a couple inches off here, though it’s not that big a deal for me

Legs: 20″ I don’t know what will happen here; I imagine increasing my running might actually increase this number.

NOTES:

Monday, 9/12/2011

I “celebrated” my first day on Paleo by eating out (I know, weird, huh?) at a local diner. I had an omelet with onions, peppers, and tomatoes, and a fruit cup, half glass of orange, and half a cup of tea. Dinner was two burgers without the buns, a cup of tomato salad (fresh tomatoes and balsamic vinegar), and dessert was a  few pieces of dark chocolate.

Tuesday, 9/13/2011

Day two was less enjoyable. I ate somewhat late – Paleo soup for lunch, and then a hot dog and a couple of salads for dinner. I got hungry in the evening, so I had some melon sorbet (which I made myself, so I know it’s Paleo) and an apple for a snack. I admit, I’m still hungry as I write this (at 1:30am), but I’ll just wait until morning to have some bacon and eggs for breakfast. Mmm, bacon!

We have five more women signed up to show you their bras:

Trina Nolan (@StarryBlonde21 on Twitter)

Rachael Acklin (@caffeinatedelf on Twitter)

Rebecca Massey (@beckaboo on Twitter)

Girl on the Right (@RightGirl on Twitter)

PandaDementia (@PandaDementia on Twitter)

We’ve also had the Frederick’s of Hollywood Twitter account retweet our event:

How cool is THAT?!

The event officially starts on October 1, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but we do have the fundraising website set up, so if you want you can donate now.

We’re still looking for volunteers who are willing to show us their bras to raise money for Breast Cancer Research. Remember, if we raise $1000, we’ll be posting the pics of all our volunteers (including me!) in their bras. We’ll continue updating this website with information, so check here – or my Twitter feed, @astrogirl - often!

I might be exaggerating, but going Paleo is no mean feat when you’re a die-hard fan of grains (especially wheat) like I am. Bread, cake, cookies…I love it all. And I eat it all. I also thoroughly enjoy dairy – cheese, ice cream, and butter – and sugar. So to go Paleo – to cut out grains, dairy products, refined sugars, and basically anything that a hunter-gatherer wouldn’t have eaten ten thousand* years ago, is a special challenge to me.

I’ve known for a while, though, that I need to change my eating habits. I’m not eating enough fresh fruits and vegetables, and I eat way too much processed sugar and grains. I need a jump start. So when a friend told me about the Primal Blueprint 30-day Challenge, I decided this was my watershed moment – I could either say yes, and make the changes I needed, or make excuses for the next 50 years.

I chose the challenge.

So. The Primal Blueprint 30-day Challenge started yesterday, Monday September 12. My goals are few; as part of the challenge, I need to:

• Go hardcore – and I do mean HARDcore – on primal. No grains (rice, wheat, corn, barley, Quinoa, etc.), dairy, or refined sugar. No excuses, no bullshit, no cheating. None. I can have meat, vegetables (besides grains), nuts, seeds, fruit, honey, eggs. And I can have bacon and chocolate, as long as the chocolate is dark. I’m allowing myself wine, only because I know I don’t drink much – if at all – but no vodka or beer.
• Exercise 3 times a week (exercise is either running or an hour of Zumba).

I’m going to be journaling, both here and privately, every day during this challenge. I’ll try to maintain a food journal as well, and will report that when I blog. I’ll probably blog every day on this – or close to every day. I’ll also be tracking my stats – weight, measurements. I’ll report those weekly (because doing it more often will make me insane). I’ll post later today on my first couple of days on the Challenge, and I’m looking forward to kicking my lazy, fat butt into shape.

Balls to the wall, baby.

Want to join the challenge? It’s not too late – click this link to sign up. I’ll totally be in awe of you if you do.

*I have no idea if that number is correct, but I’m too damn tired to go look it up.