I hope dead people watch me shower, especially since I just got my bazillionth bill in this week, this time a bill for almost $10k for my recent stay in the hospital. My insurance won’t cover any of it because the incompetent doctors considered what I had to be a mental illness rather than a medical emergency due to fever and an allergic reaction to medicine related to pneumonia. Everything is racking up. I’m so ready to sell this house already so I can get out of debt.

The good news is that I have this really cool pen. And I’ve found that I’m now obsessed with really cool G-rated movies. They’re so trippy! If any of you get the chance to watch Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, I highly recommend it. It’s a fantastic movie and when Maurice and I watched it together, we both swore that I was Mr. Magorium because his character went through similar events that I went through when I was at the hospital. It was surprisingly well-acted, well-scripted, and well-directed. Or at least, it felt like a perfect movie partly because I connected so well to the main character. And it was a movie designed for children, who knew? I’m really starting to dig the kid movies. I love being drawn into the world of innocence and wonder. It’s hard to believe that even though I’m a dominatrix, I still could use an innocence button.

Speaking of dominatrix. Yesterday I started re-arranging the furniture so that my house looks like something a “normal vanilla mutant” might want to buy. I even got rid of all my dominatrix equipment (now in the garage ready for haul). Imagine the look on Goodwill’s face when they receive the St. Andrew’s cross and bondage chair. I want the house to sell and before we put it up for sale, we gotta make it look buyable. It looks beauuutiful right now… but I had to take down all the personality off the walls and make it look more conservative. No more magic mushroom wall hangings. No more blacklights. No more orgy courch – it’s been separated into two rooms. That sorta sucked. Now I just gotta get some trees removed from the backyard that fell over during a storm, fix a ceiling, fix the upstairs shower plumbing, and re-dig a drainage ditch. Other than that, we can sell it. At this point, I’m even willing to sell it with all my furniture in it and sell it “Furnished.” I just want it sold so I can get out of this debt I’ve racked up. Oh well. I’m gonna leave my trust with the universe and have faith that something or someone will come along and make all our dreams come true. Sometimes I wonder if money can really fall from the sky, and if so… what’s the catch, should we reach up and grab it. It seems that most beautiful offers come with strings.

By the way, after much debate, I’m temporarily no longer a vegetarian and am back on Jenny Craig. Since I got back from the hospital, I’ve gained approx. 20 pounds and as much as I despise the idea of eating tortured animals, I feel my health must come first. I just can’t go back to where I was. I just can’t. Once I get to my goal weight, I’m confident I can revert back to being a vegan or vegetarian and maintain my weight just fine. It’s losing (not maintaining) weight that’s been difficult. Eating meat is killing me, but I’m doing it. I would have sticked with Nutri-System’s vegetarian program, but the food was repulsive. I’d rather eat tree bark.

On a good note, IsabellasRecordings.com is being redesigned and will bounce off the walls with visual stimulation.

Love
Isabella
xoxoxoxo

And what’s awesome to me about eating at Roots is that no matter who I take there, the connection always seems to be perfect. There’s never a worry about weirdness or being too romantic or too hopeful or too overpriced or too much expectation. It’s the very kind of place a person can be oneself. For some reason, I equate cloth napkins as being the type of accessory in which a person has to act slightly differently than their “normal self” which is one reason I like to eat at places with disposable ones. But I don’t like fast food cause it’s too unhealthy, too cheap, often times: too dirty, and most of the employees have little incentive to keep things clean and awesome. Roots is the perfect alternative. It’s quick enough so you don’t feel like you’re waiting forever for your food. It’s long enough so you have time to communicate with your friends without rushing. It’s clean enough that you could eat off the floor. And it feels like a mom and pop type place except run by twenty-somethings.

After Roots, she and I went to the Dharma Emporium where we bought some oils, a tie-dyed Bloomington t-shirt, hemp necklaces, books about the mind, and a trippy poster. Then we went to a restaurant/bar/shopping place called “Farm” so we could see what all the hype was about. I bought some organic soaps and candles and checked out the menu for later use. A bit expensive for what they were offering. For a simple hot veggie dish, it was $18. Some things went as high as $26, which in itself isn’t a lot of money, but in Bloomington it is. We made acquaintances with some of the workers and had a few free samples and listened to some “Me and Mrs. Jones” music playing over head. Their bar seems pretty hip. Must go back.

When we went to her place, we waited till darkness then took a walk to a nearby lake where we heard the most beautiful sounds of animals in the grass and water but couldn’t make out what type of animal we could hear. It almost sounded like geese and frogs but could have been something different. Listening to those animals was pure magic… and quite musical. Then we spotted what we thought was a black cat but at no point could we make out details. We made the assumption that we thought it was a cat based on the fact there were times at which it appeared there was no grass. By using the process of deletion we were able to make a valid conclusion that where there was no grass, there was darkness. And that darkness moved in the shape synonymous with that of a cat.

It’s the small things that really count.

Love
Isabella
xooxox

I haven’t lost any pounds since September. In fact, I had plateaued for almost 6 months. Then in this month (April), I actually gained 15 pounds (and no, it wasn’t muscle). Can you believe it? I gained. And this was all while I was consciously watching my eating portions, went for semi-daily walks, and had lots of mind motivation. So instead of losing 100 pounds… it’s as if I’ve only lost 85 pounds.

This frustrated me, and lit a fire under my ass quicker than you can say, “cheese.”

After much self-conflict, I decided to try Nutri-System because they have a vegetarian program that I can follow. Becoming vegetarian, essentially, would mean eating dairy products again. A huge part of me does NOT want to do this (for my love of animals). But the other part of me is begging to do this (because I love myself). My love for myself won. Today, my Nutri-System food came in… enough for a full month. Today is my first day on the program. Officially I’m a vegetarian, not a vegan. Mark my words: once I get to my goal weight and am able to maintain it, I have every intention of becoming vegan again. I enjoyed that eating lifestyle very much and felt sooo good doing it.

So now that I’m on NS, I am confident that this will be the much-needed push to get me over the roller-coaster hump and push me downhill. I have about 115 pounds to lose. I’ll be sure to keep you all posted over time for those that have been following my weight reduction over the past year and a half. I can just *FEEL* that this program is going to catapult me right where I should be. This is the exact same feeling I got when I walked into Jenny Craig for the first time and just *knew* they could help. And they did. They helped save my life.

In the meantime, here is a photo of my back. Someone requested I show a zoomed in shot of my tattoos so they could see more detail work. Here you go!

P.S. I’m considering getting a scorpion (or other scorpio symbol) tattooed underneath Marilyn.

Here’s a photo of my upper right arm/shoulder:

Love
Isabella
xoxooxox

P.S. Tomorrow Johnny goes to the vet for a checkup. I’m crossing my fingers that he’s been healing this week!

Halfway through the book, it started mentioning vegetarianism and how healthy it is for you and I was like, yeah yeah. So what. But then it started talking about the cruelty done to animals and got so specific that I lost my lunch and puked in the bookstore bathroom. If I am what I eat, I don’t want to be a “dead, rotting corpse” which essentially, is what meat is. I bought the book and five minutes later I was at a health food store stocking up on vegan food. My whole refrigerator is vegan right now and I’ve tossed out everything I own in my whole house that isn’t healthy.

Starting tomorrow morning, I am going to give up all dairy and meat (of all animals). Ironically, I had cheese, tuna, lobster, and egg nog today – so I’ll start tomorrow. I hope I can give it up cold turkey (pardon the pun) but even a gradual shift to get off of it will be good too. I’ve never been a vegetarian or a vegan and this is very new to me, but I’ve just been exposed to the “real world” of slaughterhouses and there is no way in the world I can continue to support that. I mean, I’ve known what happens to chickens (and it’s horrible) but I still continued to eat them because I figured, hey – I’m on the top of the food chain, who cares? But after seeing (and reading) what happens with chickens, turkeys, cows, pigs, etc… it truly makes me sick to my stomach. And all that stuff I was putting into my body is so harmful (and fattening) that I don’t see how it benefits people. Sure, meat tastes good. But some alternative meat stuff tastes good too. I don’t see why I couldn’t try out the veg lifestyle and see how my body handles it.

I feel guilty knowing all the leather products I’ve purchased – mostly for bondage. I’m tempted to throw away all my expensive leather purses (or at least give them away). But is it wrong of me to want to keep my leather BDSM stuff? I mean, I know there are non-leather alternatives, but they don’t have the “sting” or the bite when hitting people. Perhaps I’ll just stick with what I have and stop buying more products with that. Leather corsets? Fuck I’ll miss them. But at least I can wear latex or vinyl instead. I don’t know if this will be a permanent decision or not, but the way I’m feeling right now, I’m pretty adamant about it.

I suppose this may sound like a pretty dramatic lifestyle change, and truth be told, I’ve often rolled my eyes at other people who stopped eating meat cause I thought they were pussies or tree-huggers. But I swear, after reading and watching some of the stuff I’ve seen, I feel the only way to stop animal cruelty is if I stop buying the products. We all know that money controls the industry. And for each person that goes veg, that saves the lives of 90 animals a year. 90! Sheesh. Count me in. I look at my kitty cat, John Holmes, and when I think of the possibility that people will sit on his body for the hell of it just to watch it’s intestines pop out of his anus – it disgusts me. And yet, workers do that to turkeys all the time. The stuff I read, really, truly, made me lose my lunch. I even watched it happen on video (at goveg.com) and… wow. I am speechless.

The only thing that concerns me is that for over a year, I’ve been on the Jenny Craig diet. I really want to maintain the diet I am on because it is *working* for me. The next time I go in, I’ll see if they have any vegetarian or vegan alternatives. I really really hope they have something I can work with or else I may have no choice but to get off of it. For someone like me who has lost a dramatic amount of weight eating Jenny Craig products, that’s a pretty big statement. If I do stop the program, I hope they’ll help me maintain a healthy diet after leaving.

Special thanks to Mistress Lycia for buying me this shirt for my birthday!

Love
Isabella
xoxoxo

P.S. Later this week, I’m going to go to my first AA meeting. I don’t consider myself an alcoholic, but I do have a problem when it comes to social drinking. I rarely drink, but when I do, it gets way out of hand.

Fuck new years resolutions. I’m starting my resolutions early.