Posts Tagged ‘health and wellness’

Happy Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!!

I hope you’re all having a fantastic day!  We’ve got the turkey in the oven here, the cranberry dressing chilling in the fridge, rolls rising on the stove, and all the rest of what we’ll need sitting out and waiting for the time when we’ll start putting it all together.  We’ve got somewhere around 5 or 6 people on the way over sometime in the afternoon to share dinner with us.  It’s an “Orphan Party!”  All our local friends who have family too far away to go visit for the holiday were invited over to spend the day.  There’s going to be card games and lots of food and it’s going to be a fantastic day!  I’ve got hot cider simmering in the crock pot and cheese and crackers for munching between now and dinner.

I’m excited!  It’ll make up in a big way for Monday and Tuesday of this week — I had to work through a migraine on Monday and  the remnants of that headache on Tuesday.  Not sure what it was that set off my headache, but it HURT, even though I took a ton of meds for it.  And I couldn’t go home because there was just SO much to get done!  And even more to get done on Tuesday.  It was Not Fun.  So when we finished everything late Tuesday, I asked if it was really going to be necessary for me to work on Wednesday, and since my boss said “no,” I stayed home yesterday — slept in, went to the chiropractor’s, picked up a few things from the store, made a cheesecake, and started getting ready for today.  It would have been nasty to work yesterday and then have to do all of that today instead.  So I’m really thankful for the day off yesterday.  :)

And I’m thankful for the free turkey our friend got from work that she gave to us to use for the meal today.

I’m thankful for my wonderful husband who compliments me so well — I make a mess putting the turkey together and he cleans up the mess!

I’m thankful for all our friends who are going to come over today.

I’m thankful for the job options that I’ve been given, even though they’re giving me headaches.

And I’m thankful for all of you!  I love you!!

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

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Chilly!

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

It may be possible that I have lived in the south for too long.  This morning I practically sprinted across the parking lot to get inside the building where I work.  The temperature was in the 40s and in my button-up long-sleeved shirt and knee-length skirt, I was freezing!  Tomorrow I will wear a jacket.  And maybe a hat and gloves and pants.  Except I don’t really have any work pants left – my last remaining pair has a key ring attached to the zipper since the pull broke off and even with that feature, the zipper has developed a fear of heights and I have to safety pin the key ring at the top-most position of the zipper in order to maintain my businesslike, professional appearance.  Yup.  That’s how it’s rolling around here.  But I’ve got a bunch of skirts that I wear so it’s not like being pants-less is an issue.

Anyway!  The point was that it was cold!  And maybe I would have handled the temperature better if two days ago it hadn’t been in the 80s.  I mean, we went from highs in the 80s to highs in the 60s in the course of an afternoon.  It was warmer yesterday at 6:00 in the morning than it was at 4:00 in the afternoon.  That’s just not right!

So, obviously, the only solution is to make a trip up to the cold northern climes to reacclimatize myself to the temperatures, so yesterday Justin and I got tickets to make that trip.  I put our information about that on the forum on Erica’s website so interested parties can see that.  I’m looking forward to the trip!

Part of that excitement might be because it has been absolutely insane around here lately.  I don’t even have the time to go over how crazy it’s been, but trust me – crazy.  And my back is killing me.  And my addiction to the Layton franchise is going strong.  And I’m starting a new diet in order to lose a little weight before our trip up north.  And all of these things I should write about, but I don’t have the time right now because things are just so darn crazy.

But I’ll try to do something soon.  Like maybe I’ll actually take a Friday and not work!  Maybe . . . .

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Rain, rain, rain

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

Potential landfall for Irene is shifting further and further north and east of us here.  If she keeps on turning, we might not even get much rain.  That actually would be a shame because we could use the water.

On the other hand, Justin is helping the church move the equipment from the high school to a storage shed near the movie theatre on Friday and that would be miserable to do in the rain.  The school, where we have been meeting in the auditorium, was struck by lightning the week before last, I think it was, and it knocked out their fire alarm system.  The school worked out an evacuation plan so the kids are safe during classroom hours, but extracurricular activies and other people who rent the building are out of luck.  So we’ve moved to the movie theatre down the street.  All our kids ministry and music equipment is stored at the school, though, so the church has to move it out and down the street, but during hours when the school will let us in do to that.  So, Friday afternoon, hopefully, is when that’ll happen.

And the on Sunday, after church because Justin is on rotation to run the computer and projector and I’m on schedule for singing, we’re helping a couple of our friends move from Beaufort to Bluffton.  It kind of works out well that we can’t help in the morning because they have a cat that sheds like a maniac.  With any luck, they’ll be at the place in Bluffton by the time we get out to help and the cat will be safely tucked away somewhere and we’ll be able to help without dying from allergies.  But, again, it would be miserable to do that in the rain.

In other news, I hurt my knee a little bit running.  I landed on it wrong and hyperextended it just a little bit, probably.  It’s been hurting on the calf-side behind my knee.  But ice and Advil and rest and a really annoying knee brace and it’s doing much better already.  We took a rest day yesterday instead of our regular running schedule and it was GOOD.

Honestly, the rest day was only partially because of my knee and also because we’ve both been having  a heck of a week and we both just needed time to do absolutely nothing.  It’s been really crazy and we’re both feeling the strain.  So we ate leftovers for dinner, I folded the laundry that Justin washed during the day, and then I sat downstairs watching TV while he played computer games with friends online.  I finished off the bottle of wine, which really only meant I had a glass and a half, but it made me giggle.  And then we had ice cream cake that we found at the grocery store on Tuesday.  It was perfectly relaxing and wonderful and NEEDED.

Today we’re back at it, plugging away.  It’s going to get better eventually.  We just have to slog through a couple more week of this, hopefully, and then we’ll be out.

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Happy birthday, Erica!

Monday, August 8th, 2011

Happy birthday to my wonderful sister, Erica, who I totally tried to call earlier but who didn’t answer, even though it was only, like, 4:30 in Minnesota and who I must therefore assume was out rocking the town because by my count she’s turning 30 and that’s absolutely the birthday for which you should go out and rock the town.  Yea!!  So I’m not going to call her back tonight because now it’s after 8:00 there and I’m really hoping that part of her birthday also means that she actually gets some sleep for the first time since JD’s birthday (doesn’t that sound like a fantastic birthday present?!) and besides that I don’t have any cell service at the house and she’s not on Skype right now (again, hopefully either rocking the town or sleeping) so I don’t actually have a way to call her and I’ll just have to catch up with her some other time.

BUT!  I really do hope that your birthday was ABSOLUTELY OFF THE WALL FANTASTIC and I’m sorry I didn’t send you anything, but I hope Tim got you something AWESOME and we’ll totally have to catch up later this week.

I wasn’t even home on Friday, when I would normally call.  Friday, I got up and went to the church offices to do my monthly cleaning there, and then when I got home, Justin and I ran down to Savannah to run a couple errands and catch a showing of “Cowboys & Aliens” (really fun movie, by the way) and then drove straight from there up to Beaufort to go to a board games party at a friends house.  And we were there until after midnight so I started to fall asleep on their couch, which was why it wasn’t until we were nearly all the way home before we realized that I’d forgotten my purse, with our house keys, back at their house.  45 minutes away.  But luck!  I stuck a spare house key under the bumper of the car!  And fail — the key didn’t actually work.  We have no idea why it didn’t work, but the dang thing wouldn’t turn.  So at 1:30 in the morning, Justin borrowed our neighbor’s extension ladder and climbed in through a window on the second floor of our house.

Saturday, I was fighting off some bug because I slept a lot.  I tried to stay awake and managed a couple hours at a time, but then would fall back asleep again.  It was really annoying, actually.  I slept through most of Sunday morning, too, failing to go to church, and then took it pretty easy for the rest of the afternoon.  Friends came over in the evening to collect boxes from our attic for moving and we fed them dinner in exchange for ice cream and Justin fixed the power supply on one of their computers, too, and some other computer work.

And after they left, because the air conditioning unit refuses to blow cold air, we set up the bed in the living room and slept down there.  The a/c unit upstairs hasn’t been working right for the last week or so.  It was working in the evenings, like it was exhausted from the heat, too, and decided that it would just work its best overnight.  And then it stopped doing that, too.  The downstairs unit is working, so we’ve got a box fan at the bottom of the stairs, blowing air up to another fan that moves it closer to either Justin’s office or the bedroom, depending on where it’s turned, and a third fan that blows air up from the floor into faces.  But it’s just not quite cutting it.  So we’ll be camping out downstairs for a couple days.  We have an appointment set up for a guy to come look at it on Friday, which our landlady set up a couple weeks ago for regular maintenance.  So when he comes, hopefully he’ll take care of the problem.

And how’s that for about the most random post ever?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAE-MAE!!

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RUN!

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

So, I’m pretty sure you all know this about me, but if you didn’t already know:  I’m terrified of spiders.  TERRIFIED.  Have been for a long time.  Maybe before the day when I was playing in the yard as a small child and saw a huge daddy long-legs spider climbing up toward my face on my arm, but for SURE after that.  I don’t like them.  They creep me out.  I don’t like pictures of them.  I don’t like videos of them.  I don’t like seeing them.  And I sure as heck don’t like touching them.

I’ve been working on it.  I can handle little ones.  And by “little” I mean smaller than the eraser on a pencil.  And by “handle” I mean kill on my own or step away from without shouting.  I can handle them a little bigger than that when they’re outside and heading in a different direction from me.  So, working in the yard and upsetting spiders in the grass?  Okay as long as they’re running away.  Inside the house, they have to be little.  Big as a dime and I call Justin down to save me.  And I won’t go close to him as long as he’s handling it and he has to wash his hands before I’ll touch him.  If I’m very brave, I can kill one in the house with the vacuum.

Luke can probably remember the day we were sitting down to dinner and I freaked out because a tiny little spider suddenly showed up on the table beside me.  I shouted and jumped away and the thing was seriously smaller than half a pencil eraser.  I was playing a game online with some friends and one of them thought it would be hilarious to suddenly throw a picture of a tarantula up on the game.  I screamed and started shaking and Justin had to come out of his office (I was sitting in the living room on another computer) and calm me down before we could go back to playing.  To this day, I’m can’t remember how I managed to sit in the same room with the real live tarantula that Mr. Dennis had in his biology class.  And every couple months, I bolt awake from sound sleep because I think there’s a spider in bed with me, on my pillow or in the sheets or climbing up the walls.

So Justin and I have started running again.  (Can you guess where this is going now?)  We’ve been running on the bike path along the main road near our house, but the other day Justin found a trail that we could go running on.  We checked it out last week and it was fantastic!  We’ve already established on other runs that he goes first and knocks down any spiderwebs on the trail.  It’s either that or I run the whole way with an arm up in front of my face like I’m waiting for the noose to drop in Phantom of the Opera.  (“Raise up your hand to the level of your eyes!”)  So we ran the trail last week, found it to be delightful and not too overgrown, and planned to return in a couple days.

Today we returned to the trail.  And about 100 feet in, Justin ran into a spiderweb that stopped him in his tracks because it was enormous and gross and all over his face.  So he stopped to pick it out (and I’m already getting creeped out just telling this story) and I stood about 3 feet away helping him see if there was a spider on the web and if he got it all out.  (Me, helping!  By standing out of arms reach away from the spiderweb!)  So he did and he stuck it to a nearby bush and I saw something out of the corner of my eye.  At which point I SCREAMED and turned and ran.  Apparently Justin had to yell “STOP” like 8 times before I heard him and turned around.  I got maybe 10 feet away.  He asked, “WHAT?!”

I shouted back, “I FOUND THE SPIDER!”

“Where?!”  At this point, he’s thinking it’s on him.  On his neck and if he moves he’s going to die, so he’s standing completely stock still.

“THERE!”  And I pointed at the spider.  It was hanging in the air about a foot away from where my face had been.  He didn’t see it.  But I wasn’t pointing at him, so he looked around.

“Where?”

“There!”  And I managed to somehow explain that it was eye-level at his 2:00 (I think I said 11:00, since I was opposite from him) and THEN he saw it.

“OH.”  And he pointed back at the bike path.  “GO. RUN.”

And I BOLTED.  By the time I hit the sidewalk, I was worked up in to a good solid sprint and speeding up.  I had the fear in me and I was hauling it as fast as I could possibly haul it.  And then the timer on Justin’s phone beeped — the timer that’s telling us on the Couch to 5K program when we should walk and when we should run.  And since we’d been running, the beep meant it was time to walk.  My ears heard the beep and my feet turned the running into a walk.  Sprint to walk in 3 seconds or less.  And then my brain caught up and I started to hyperventilate.

The spider was huge.  Irrationally, I want to say that it was as big as my face, which just really creeps me out and I can’t even follow that thought to the finish.  It probably wasn’t that big.  It was maybe 4 inches long, including the legs, but it was BIG.  And close to my face.  And BIG.  And I think it was yellow and black, but I couldn’t even really tell you that and there’s not any chance in heaven I’m going to look it up to try to figure out what it was.  Not.  Happening.

Justin caught up with me when I stopped and asked if I was okay, and helped me calm down and stop hyperventilating.  That took a little bit.  He gave me a thorough looking over to make sure I didn’t have a spider on me, and I checked him to make sure he was clear, too.  And then we walked away from the trail and back up the paved bike path that we’d been running on.  And we walked until I was sure not to hyperventilate again and then we picked up the running again so we could finish the training for the day.  And now and then I’d shudder and twitch and Justin would reassure me that there wasn’t a spider nearby and we were okay on the bike path.  But I could still close my eyes and see it.

And, really, I can STILL close my eyes and see it, but I’ve found my solution for when I go to bed:

(1) I’m leaving the dang light on and I don’t care if it makes me look like I’m 6 years old, I am not going to sleep in the dark.  Justin comes to bed later than I do because he doesn’t get up at 5:15 in the morning and he can turn it off when he comes in.

(2) I’m imaging myself on the beach.  There aren’t spiders like that on the beach.  There are crabs and jellyfish and lots of other weird things in the water, but spiders can’t breathe underwater (Lord, save me from that thought) and I can sit on the sand with my toes in the water and not worry about spiders at all.  I can sit under my umbrella in my fantastic beach chair and stare out at the waves and not have to worry about them at all.  I know that there are big spiders in the woods just off the beach, but ON the beach?  NO SPIDERS.  So that’s where I’ll be picturing myself when I close my eyes.

Anyway.  Justin says he’s never seen me quite so freaked out.  And I’m not sure I have all the details right.  I didn’t know he shouted at me to stop until we were talking it over again while getting dinner ready.  I honestly have no recollection of him shouting — though it does make sense because there’s no other reason why I would have stopped instead of just running my butt all the way back out of the woods.  And, if it wasn’t already obvious, we won’t be going back into the woods for a while again.

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