Rainy morning
March 11th, 2010

It’s raining this morning.  Small rivers run down sidewalks and across pavement, rimmed with bright yellow banks of pollen dust.  I’m not sure what exactly is blooming so quickly after the chilly weather, but I am sure that it’s doing it very well.  So far it isn’t enough to bother my allergies, but I’m sure that day is coming.

I step over a river to go through the gate and into work, trying to keep my shoes dry.  I hold my umbrella over my head, angled to the slant of the rain.  It’s brightly colored polka-dots coordinate wonderfully with the monochromatic polka dots on my skirt.  An elbow on my umbrella is broken and it hangs down limply like a broken wing.  Water drips off the edges of my umbrella and I hope the book in my purse isn’t getting wet.

Wind picks up my hair and blows it into my face and I have to stop and brush it out of my eyes before I keep walking.  I’m running a little late because I had to stop for a train, but if I walk half-blind, I’ll step into a puddle.  My shoes are wet already, soaking through to my socks.  When I get up to my desk, I’ll have to set them in front of the space heater under my desk for a while.

It’s a dark morning, this close to Daylight Savings, and I’m sure this rain is going to last all day.  It’s good for the grass.  I can see the colors changing when I drive through the marsh—a hint of pale green creeping into the golden and gray grass growing there.  A fire went through there earlier this week, burning a portion of the dry grass.  I suspect it was started by a careless commuter’s cigarette, but I’m hesitant to say that it’s a bad thing.  The marsh burns every year and I think it’s part of the natural cycle of that environment.

But there won’t be any burning this morning.  Only mud puddles from this rain.

There was a flower blooming in the flowerbed outside my house this morning.  It wasn’t there yesterday, but suddenly this morning:  Flower!  I hope this rain helps bring on more blossoms.  I really need to get out and cut down last year’s pampas grass and the branches off the crepe myrtle trees, but it’s not going to happen today.

I reach the door of my building, collapse my umbrella and shake off the rain.  My toes are cold from the damp and I’m looking forward to that space heater.  It’s going to be a long day.  I’m running on too little sleep and I have a lot of complicated work to finish and several meetings to attend.  My mother in law will be at the house when I get home.

But for right now, I’m going to go clock into work and go make myself some warm tea and oatmeal.  Put my shoes and toes in front of the space heater.  Hang my wounded umbrella on the wall.

And get started on my day.

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Church cleaning
March 10th, 2010

About two months ago, it came to my attention that there was no one cleaning the church offices besides our church staff.  We don’t have a church building – we meet in the local high school – so there’s no need to have anyone cleaning the actual church building.  But we have a set of offices and the church staff was charged with doing their own toilet scrubbing.  Now, I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t seem right to me.  And it didn’t seem right to another woman in the church, either.  So we set up a schedule and now we’re scrubbing the toilets instead.

It’s a pretty wide rotation, currently.  Every two weeks, one or the other of us goes in.  Last week was my week on the rotation.  She did it two weeks before that and she’ll do it again the Friday after next.  I’m waiting to hear back whether we should clean more frequently than that, but so far, it seems to be working.

The head pastor is really excited that we’re doing it.  He came in on my first Friday (Friday and Saturday counts as the weekend for the church staff, since they work on Sunday) and told me that he was so thankful for the work.  And he said so again that Sunday when I ran into him after church.

I’m glad that he’s happy about it.  But his appreciation isn’t why I’m doing it.

The reason I’m doing it is because it needed to be done.  There was a need and no one was filling it, so the two of us stepped up and we’re taking care of that need.

But also because it should keep me humble.  I’m starting to get recognized at church because I sing with the band sometimes.  Even when I’m not singing that week, people still come up to me and mention it and tell me that I sound good.  It’s easy for that to go to my head.  But it’s a gift that I’ve been given (cultivated by my mom (thank you, Mom!)) – my ability to sing and harmonize with a group and feel comfortable enough to stand on stage and share it with other people.

But I’ve also been given a talent for cleaning and organizing.  And if getting on my knees to clean the toilets at the church office doesn’t remind me of how important it is to do the behind-the-scenes dirty jobs that no one wants to do, then I don’t know what will.  If I can get the same sense of service while I’m singing as I can while I’m cleaning, then I’ll know that I’m not doing it to get the praise of people watching.

I cleaned the offices on Friday for four and a half hours.  It was hard, dirty work, but that place sparkled when I left and it felt wonderful.  I was tired and sweaty and I smelled like dumpster, but I left a bouquet of flowers in the conference room and a clean coffeepot in the kitchen.  And how can I not feel happy about that?

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Weight-loss stuff
March 9th, 2010

I’m going to write about exercise and weight loss and all of that in this post, which is something I try not to write about much because (1) I’m not very good at it and (2) I think it’s kind of boring.  But I want to let you all know what’s happening with this.  I’ll try not to write about it too much in the coming months.

So, in my last post, I mentioned my doctor appointment and that I’ve got a follow-up in six months to check on my weight-loss progress.  I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about how I’m going to approach this problem.

Here’s what I’ve got so far.  I have an account at MyFoodDiary.com and I know that if I actually go on there and track what I’m doing, I will lose weight.  I lost weight this way before—exercising and tracking my calories through this program.  So I’m doing that again.  Now, it only works if I actually go on there and enter in what I’m doing and I really don’t like doing that.  It’s a pain in the butt.  So my incentive to do this is that if I can log my food for 30 days in a row, I’m going to get a massage.  I love massages, but it’s been over a year since I last got one.  So!  Goal = 30 days straight of logging my food = Reward = MASSAGE.

I have a set of cards on the wall of my desk at work under my clock that count up to 30 (0-3 on one set and 0-9 on the other) and I have a tick mark on my mirror at home and I’m going to keep track.  I’ll also keep track through MFD, but I’m learning about visual management at work and the affectivity of it.

On my mirror, I’ve also written “Log your food!  Be nice to Justin – you asked for his help.”  Because he’s wonderful and gives me gentle prodding about logging and exercising and what I should and shouldn’t eat, and I get cranky at him.  So I’m going to try very hard to not do that anymore.  I appreciate his help. And I did ask him to help me.  So it’s not at all fair for me to get grumpy at him.

And that goes for the rest of you, too.  If you want to prod me about how things are going, I’m going to try very hard not to get grumpy about it.  So, please!  Go ahead and prod.  Send me emails and call and ask how I’m doing and if I’ve logged my food and if I’ve exercised today and if I’ve had enough water to drink and give me recommendations on different things I should try.  Because I have a wonderful bunch of family and friends and if I can’t accept help from all of you, then I’m in trouble.

I’m also putting in a request to get a nurse to help me.  My employer is starting up a program to help us improve our health and one of the issues that they’ll help with is being overweight.  I’m not sure what’s going to happen with that, exactly, but at this point, I’m willing to take any help I can get.

Okay, so that covers my calorie counting and accepting help from everybody possible.

Currently, this is my exercise program:  Monday and Wednesday night, I go to Zumba class.  Saturday morning, I go to yoga class.  That leaves Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday on my own.  What I’ve been trying to do is to practice Zumba or yoga on my own or do an exercise video.  Now that the weather is going to get nicer, I’ll be adding more outdoor activities.  Got to catch the weather between when it’s too chilly for rollerblading and too hot!  It’s not a long window.  In the summer months, I’ll get back into swimming again. 

What I’m missing is weight training.  I think it’s something I’ll want to be doing, I’m just not sure exactly when.  Yoga has a lot of muscle work in it that works with body weight, but I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t be hitting the weights at the gym, too.  I’m still trying to figure that one out.

My overall goal is to lose 50 pounds in the next six months.  It’s a strong goal and I know that.  I’m going to have to work very hard to try to make that goal.  But I think that setting a goal that’s fairly difficult but not completely unattainable is a good idea.  That’s a loss of 2 pounds a week, which is healthy for my current weight and it’s going to be healthy for a long while.  Once I get past this first 50, it’s going to slow down, but for this first half, it’s attainable.

I need to lose nearly 100 pounds.  I’m sitting at 232 pounds right now.  I want to get down to 140-ish.  By my doctor appointment in six months, I want to be at 180.

And that’s that!  More information than you probably wanted to hear about my weight-loss situation.  :)

I’m on day 2 of logging my food.  Only 28 more to go before I earn my massage!

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Loving the fish oil pills
March 5th, 2010

Yesterday afternoon I had my follow-up check-up for the appointment I had three months ago. (Operation Crazy Owl continues.)

At that time, my triglycerides were up and my cholesterol wasn’t where it should be and my blood sugar was higher than it should be and it just wasn’t good blood-work all the way around.  I had three months to do something about it.

At my appointment yesterday, my triglycerides were much lower than they had been (by about half), my cholesterol was much better, and my blood sugar was much better.  My weight is still bad.  And a few of those numbers could handle going a little further toward the “good” side of things.  But it’s doing better.  I’ve been taking fish oil pills with my multivitamin every day, and I think that’s had a lot to do with it, plus regular exercise.

So now I just have to work on logging my food better and actually work on getting my weight down.

One of the other things I talked with her about was my asthma.  Do you remember that terrible cold I got back before Christmas?  (I’ve been sleeping.)  It’s was a bad cold and it settled into my chest and did unpleasant things.  Since then, I’ve had to take an inhaler almost every time I exercise.  And sometimes just because it’s cold out and I’m feeling short of breath.  It hasn’t been fun and I don’t like this relapse of my asthma symptoms. 

My current doctor hasn’t actually had me as a patient with asthma symptoms – they recessed back around 2005-ish.  So at my appointment, she’s explaining to me the differences between emergency inhalers and maintenance inhalers and all these other things that I know SO WELL by now, let me tell you.  It was kind of funny.  Seriously, I’ve dealt with asthma for well over half of my lifetime.  I understand how it works.

Anyway, she gave me a prescription for Symbicort as a maintenance inhaler and a refill on the emergency inhaler and we’re going to try and see if the maintenance inhaler can fix whatever problem has been happening down in these lungs of mine and see if I can’t get the symptoms to go away again.  I think I damaged them a little bit with the cold and they haven’t been able to properly heal – if that’s even an idea that works medically.  I don’t know.  But I think that taking the meds for a little while will help heal my lungs enough that I can go back to being asymptomatic again, and non-medicated again, which would be lovely.

I have a return appointment in 6 months to check on my progress with getting my numbers even better – my cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, and, most significantly, my weight.  We’ll check on the status of my asthma, too.  But for the most part, I’m in better health than I was the last time I went in to see her and that makes me feel good.

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It’s raining
March 2nd, 2010

Well, we’re finally into March and we’ve started it out with a bout of social anxiety.  I got home last night and cleaned house instead of going to Zumba because just the thought of going out and being around other people made my head swim.  I couldn’t do it.  So I dusted and cleaned floors and tidied things up; Justin put stuff into the attic, shook rugs, and tidied the upstairs.  And when I had worked off enough agitation, we sat down for dinner and then cuddled in front of TV before going to bed.

Today, we’re following up with typical March weather – it’s dark and rainy.  It is, on the upside, the kind of rain that smells like it’s going to make the grass grow.  It’s a refreshing change from rain that smells like winter, gets into my shoes and makes me cold all day long.

We’ve had an interesting couple of days around here.  Friday, I was at work from 7:30 until 6:00.  On a day where I would normally work only 4 hours, a 10-hour day is absurd.  I was really irritated by the whole thing.  I mean, sure, overtime pay.  But my Friday!  I had plans for that afternoon!  All of which are now just sitting on my list of things to do and hoping that I have time to do them this coming Friday.  It isn’t looking good for that list.

For dinner on Saturday, Justin and I made “Jade and Ivory Pasta,” which is a recipe that came with my wok and we’ve made a couple of times before.  It’s fettuccini, broccoli, and chicken stir-fried in a sauce with ginger, garlic, soy sauce, sherry (that we substituted with red wine vinegar), and a couple other things.  When we got to the end of the meal, Justin’s tongue went numb.  His throat swelled up a little and he felt about as miserable as a person with an allergic reaction could feel without needing to go to the emergency room.  And we sat there, waiting to see if we would have to go to the ER, because the last time this happened to him, he spent more than a week in the hospital.  He can’t take Benedryl because it reacts badly with his system, so all he could do was brush his teeth, rinse with Listerine, and wait.

We still have no idea what set him off, so I’m eating all the left-overs while he feels miserable.  His throat and tongue are still raw and sensitive, with the unfortunate side-effect of being completely unable to taste anything.  It makes me feel sorry for people who have ageusia and never taste anything, and their spouses, for whom it’s probably almost as frustrating.

But we’re very thankful that it wasn’t worse than it was.  Meals that don’t land one of us in the ER = success!

Anyway, that’s pretty much the excitement that’s been happening around here lately.  I’ll try to write about something more interesting soon-ish.

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