Slip Sliding

Ok... officially, I'm blaming my best friend Leslie's soon-to-be-ex husband.

The chain of events;

Stupid Ex racks up credit card debt, lies, uses the company truck to hide and fall asleep at work and exhibits other assorted immature behavior.

Leslie decides that Stupid Ex is a waste of time and space (I don't disagree here) and asks for a divorce.

Stupid Ex moves back in with his parents. He also requests that Leslie give over his things (acceptable, I suppose...)

Leslie, moving some furniture around in order to get his stuff out of the house, drags a recliner over her foot, tearing her toenail off at the root.

She calls my husband for advice.

Thomas advices that she wait there and we'll come pick her up to take her to see a doctor.

We go to the Urgent Care (not very urgent, takes us three hours for her to get seen and treated.) While there, we are shut in a smallish waiting room with an older woman and her booming cough.

Two days later, I start coughing.

My asthma flares up but good. (I don't know if you recall, but about eight months ago, I was declared "perfectly healthy" by my doctor and taken off my long-term asthma medications...) Unfortunately, my asthma has slowly come back. For a few months, I wasn't using the albuterol at all, and then I started using it from time to time, especially after I did any intense cardio.

Over the last two months, it's gotten steadily worse. I was using the inhaler at least once a day, and three to four times a day if I did cardio.

Last week, I've been using it three to eight times a day, cardio or not.

And Tuesday, I about collapsed on the elliptical after 11 minutes.

So, I finally gave up and called my doctor.

I'm back on the Proventil and Serevent.

And he wanted me to go on a week's run of steroids.

And here's where I'm conflicted. As I've said before, my primary weight gain started with a few runs of prednizone back in college.

I really, really don't want to go back on steroids.

On the other hand, I've said enough as far as fucking around following my doctor's orders go. I've promised myself I'll stop being in denial about my health and actually take care of problems.

And yet... I don't want to undo the last several months of hard work by going on steroids for a week and gaining back 30 pounds. Or, if I don't gain, being unspeakably hungry for several weeks. (I remember clearly being on steroids... I was hungry all the time. Bone-gnawing, stomach twistingly hungry. And it didn't stop, no matter how much food I stuffed down my throat.)

God, please, I don't want to go back there.

I have a doctor's appointment in two weeks.

So, this is what I've decided to do; I'm going back on the long-acting inhalers for a week, and if that doesn't significantly clear up, then (and only then) will I take the week's worth of steroids.

I know my doctor wants to knock this out; and I know that he really has my best interests in mind. Lung infections are nothing to mess around with, and he's being concervative. Knock this out of my system before it can settle in and make more problems for me, long term.

And yet... why throw three things at the problem when two (or one) will fix it?

So, I'm being a little bit risky, perhaps. But I'm monitoring myself, and if I have to go back on steroids, I will.

But if I do, expect to hear me bitching. A lot.

75 pounds (Time Keeps on Ticking...)

Last night I inched over another 5 pound marker.

They're getting further and further apart as my weight loss has become this epic crawl... and it was never all that speedy to begin with. (I know, I know, safe weight loss is no more than 2 pounds a week, but hey, there's a big space in between .5 pounds a week and 2 pounds a week and I wouldn't mind sticking my weight loss averages into a slightly closer to maybe getting this done sometime this century...) Seriously; it took me eight weeks to lose five pounds... at that rate, it's going to take me twenty weeks to lose this last 13.6 pounds. So, look for me hitting my goal... oh, in September...

Ah well... it's not like I have anything better to do. Or that it's going to be over, once I reach goal weight... I'm never going to be able to eat six doughnuts and lose a pound anyway, like my husband does. So I may as well just get used to the idea that I will always have to guard myself carefully and watch everything I eat. For the rest of my life.

God, that's depressing.

I'm not meaning to be. It's actually been a pretty good week; Thomas finally got a promotion at work which came with an actual pay raise and no additional responsibilities. (That would be different from some of his previous promotions which involved a cut in take-home pay and significantly more responsibilities. I'm perfectly serious; when he moved from hourly to salary, he got a 10% pay raise, but by adding unpaid overtime and losing the double-pay for holidays, it resulted in a 3% net loss in our spending cash...)

I've just been sick for the last week and unable to hit the gym at all... Working out with a head cold is one thing, working out with an upper respiratory infection is something else entirely. I get really tired walking across the room, or coughing, or honestly much of anything. And the scary thing is, I remember when I felt like that all the time (minus the coughing... but seriously, I remember cleaning the living room in two foot chunks because bending over to pick up Darcy's toys made me tired.)...

I don't like it much.

It was Thomas's birthday and we had some fun; a smallish birthday party and then we went dancing up with some friends - which is to say, mostly we sat on barstools and listened to music. I managed to drag Thomas out onto the floor for one song, which is the first time he's danced with me in... three years. I think the last time was at my cousin's wedding. So, you know, I'm now set up with dancing until 2012.

Drive By

I'm not feeling so good today, but I didn't want to miss my Healthy You check in;

I'm down 1 pound this week. That's .4 pounds away from 75 pounds lost total. The wii-fit measures me (first thing in the morning, clothing optional) as being 1.1 pound away from "Normal" BMI. It also crosses me over the 4th 10% loss goal... (which is not, mathematically speaking, the same as 40% gone... but I've been counting down in chunks of 10%... )

Thomas is down like over three pounds this week, so once again, he sucks and I hate him. Just kidding.

Mostly.

I went for a walk on Sunday (got 5 miles logged) and found myself a hatchling painted turtle. So, now I have a turtle, and I am happy.

I had a dentist appointment today and I'm having a flake-o reaction to Novocaine that's making my fingers swell randomly. Quite uncomfortable and I'm spending most of my day in a benedryl induced fog.

Which is why this post is so disjointed and non-sensible...

Ear-itating

Well, it's really not been a fantastic week here...

It seemed to start out all right with us finally tracking down and purchasing a Wii and a Wii fit. Astonishingly enough, after running to every computer store and Game Stop in town (and oddly enough, there are a LOT of them) (as a side, side note, Best Buy was in the Completely Not Helpful or Polite list of stores... which sort of sucks since we'd JUST added them back into places we shopped after being completely turned off by their weird ass "we have preferred customers of which YOU are not part of the list" policies, but you know, hey, Circuit City is going out of business, if Best Buy wants to join them in the Alliterative Antiquated Appliance Areas that's just FINE with me!) we finally found one at the Toys R Us. The people there were helpful, kind, polite, and enthusiastic about our purchase, so they may be seeing us again to get our various accessories and stuff... (Customer Service people! It's a good thing!)

Monday, my weigh in was good; I lost .4 pounds, which usually does not please me immensely, but as it snuck me over the 70 pounds lost, I was happy. (There was also something nice, when working out, the Bike and Treadmill ask me things like Time, Weight and Age, and I was able to push the down arrow from the default weight - which is 150 - for the first time...)

Tuesday was somewhat annoying; I've fallen victim to something I knew was going to happen. The Wii Fit acts as a scale, in addition to letting me do light workouts on it, and I've started weighing in every day... now, from Sunday to Tuesday, I apparently gained at least 1 pound every day. (No, I'm pretty sure that this isn't a problem with the scale itself, as Thomas has continued to either lose or maintain his weight...) Also, Thomas usually works from home on Tuesday, so I can hit the gym... but he had several meetings he couldn't miss, so he had to go in. Blech. Which means I didn't hit the gym. My babysitter couldn't come over on Tuesday... he was supposed to come on Wednesday, but...

Wednesday I woke up at 3am from a dream of talking to someone who was deaf to realize that I had an incredible pain in my head. My ear felt like someone had put a railroad spike through it. Also, I could hear all this swishy liquid noises. I took some pain medication and went back to sleep, hoping it would go away.

It didn't. In fact, when I got up on Wednesday morning, I felt worse. My head ached acutely and I was alternating hot and cold. On top of everything else, I ended up getting vomitously ill. (Sick is falling asleep on the bathroom floor. Flylady is waking up to realize that the bathroom floor is actually really clean.) So I called my babysitter and told him not to bother to come over on Wednesday, that I was sick, and I'd let him know...

I spent all day feeling ill and sorry for myself.

Thursday, according to the Wii, I had actually gained weight.

I swear, I must be the only person on the planet that this happens to... everyone else I know gets a stomach bug and loses 6+ pounds. Hell, Thomas gets the freaking sniffles and loses 4 pounds. It is decidedly unfair.

So, according to the Wii Fit, I am up 2.4 pounds since Monday's weigh in.

BLECH.

Now, since I spent all day Wednesday feeling sick, and even though I wasn't feeling completely top-notch yesterday, I had all of Wednesdays' chores to do, plus yesterdays. And Thomas, while he'd taken his work-from-home day yesterday, was No Help at All (charter member). So I ended up running all the errands and the grocery shopping by myself yesterday (we usually do the grocery shopping together!) and nearly getting into two seperate car accidents and just generally hating the world. And everyone in it.

And, of course, the Wii Fit tells me I've gained another .4 pounds today.

Just shoot me in the head. Right here. I won't move. Promise.

The Long Walk

"Hi. My name is Lynn. You might not know me. I live in here in Chesapeake. I'm a stay at home mom. I went to college at William & Mary and majored in literature. I have a love for action movies, science fiction, Russian art, Irish beer, Jackie Chan, and just about anything with cheese on it.

I'm thirty-six years old (thirty-seven in May!) and grew up in Louisa County, Virginia. I used to spend summers in upstate New York with my grandparents. My mother's parents and my dad's parents lived about four miles away from each other, near a tiny town called Peru.

My favorite color is green.

This is my mother. You probably don't know her either. Her name is Cynda Abolt. She's sixty years old and lives in St. Simon's Island, Georgia. She's an historian and a reenactor and a member of the National Park Service. Nine years ago, she married my step-father in an early 19th century period wedding down in New Orleans.

Her favorite poem is The Doormouse and the Doctor, by A.A. Milne. She likes suspense movies, novels by Patricia Cromwell, and has an inexplicable fondness for purple cow creamers.

In October, 2007, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After surgery and several months of radiation treatment, my mother has been cancer free for a little over a year now.

(Insert picture of Gramma here, don't currently have one that's electronic)

This is my grandmother, Ethel Stafford. Her favorite color was yellow, and she had a collection of china birds, especially cardinals. During the Great Depression, she was a teacher. When my family visited her, she always made two batches of chocolate chip cookies, one with walnuts in them, for my dad, and one without, for me. She died in 1994 from pnuemonia. She had been a breast cancer survivor for almost ten years after a partial masectomy.

This is my aunt, Beth Anne. We called her Big Beth, as opposed to her daughter, Little Beth. She lived in a log cabin, and enjoyed sailing. She died two years ago from heart disease. She was also a breast cancer survivor.

Betty Poe, friend of the family. Died in 1987 from breast cancer.

I never met my friend Leslie's mother. Brynia died from breast cancer in the mid 90's, before I even met Leslie.

These are women you probably don't know. But I expect if you looked around at your mother, your grandmothers, aunts, and cousins, sisters and friends, there are women you know who have been affected by this disease. Breast cancer is the second most prevalent form of cancer, after lung cancer, and the fifth most common cause of cancer death.

In 2007, after my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I decided it was time for me to get healthy. At that time in my life, I was nearly 100 pounds overweight and had been sedintary for years. In early 2008, I joined Weight Watchers and began a more active lifestyle. A little more than a year later, I have lost seventy pounds and am now in the gym three times a week.

But it's time to do a little more.

In October, 2009, I'm going to walk in the Susan G. Komen Walk for the Cure. It's a sixty mile walk, spread over three days, to raise awareness for this disease and to raise money to help find a cure, better current treatments, and help provide screenings for people who can't afford them.

In order to do that walk, I need to raise $2,300 in sponsorship money. And, quite obviously, train to be able to walk that far."

Here's where I'm asking for your help.

At the moment, I have not actually paid my registration money to walk... I am hoping to get verbal promises for sponsorship for at least half of the money I need to raise in order to join the Walk. Once I get promises for half, I'll pay my registration fee and get an on-line donation form set up. I've gotten permission from my apartment complex manager to post requests for donations to all the residents in my complex. I'll hit up local businesses.

When I raise the money, I'll be blogging/tweeting from the walk so you can share this experience with me.

To this end, I have decided to shelve my C25K training - since really, I'm just not capable of doing that many different kinds of training - and begin working towards increasing my walking endurance.

It's going to be a long walk. I hope you'll join me.

If you are interested in making a verbal promise, please post in the comments how much you think you will be willing to sponsor me for. You are NOT obligated to do so at a later time, but if you don't think you will, or can afford to, please do not promise. When I reach a goal of 50% required donations in verbal promises, I will set up the online donation forms for you to make good! Thank you very much for listening, and for any help you can give!

Update: You guys are AWESOME. Look how far we've come in just a few hours!!

Health

I found myself having an unexpected conniption fit the other day.

I was talking with a friend about how much better I felt these days. I feel strong, doing push ups. I feel enduring, being able to run or walk or bike for half an hour. My skin feels more supple, looks clearer, is silky to the touch. I can breathe. I can run. I can walk up and down several flights of stairs.

"Guess it's true, what they say," she says. "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."

Cue explosion. Mt. Saint Lynn is blowing her top. Better evacuate.

Obviously, I'm better now, but I've been sick. And not like "oh, I have a cold," sick, but "I am going to die from this" sick.

Go ahead, look up COPD. I'll wait.

Sick. Every day of my life, for the better part of the years between 1992 and 2003. Eleven years. Eleven years where I spent a lot of time in emergency rooms. Wracked up tens of thousands of dollars of hospital bills. Ended up in ICU a few times. One time was so bad, we were pretty convinced that I was never going home again.

I learned not to laugh, because laughing could trigger a bad spell. I barely exercised, if I could possibly manage to avoid it. Cleaning my house was a major exertion, and tended to stir up dust that just aggravated my condition.

I was mildly terrified, all the time. I couldn't be more than 10 feet away from my inhaler or I got nervous, and when I got nervous, my breathing got worse. (As a note, an inhaler is supposed to contain enough doses to last for a month. I rarely lasted ten days before I needed a new one.)

And yet... in all that time; I had good friends. I got married. I had a life. I wrote two novels.

In 2002, I met a man who saved my life. My pulminologist. He took me and my disease seriously. He helped me control it, instead of it controlling me. And he didn't just treat me as an extension of my disease. He treated all parts of my life; everything from job and marriage-related stress to supporting my weight loss efforts to minimizing environmental effects.

I'm better. Healthy. My lung capacity is normal.

Yes, I still have an inhaler, and unfortunately, I still use it (generally when I'm working out) but he believes that will get better in time.

And yet, I still remember, acutely, what being seriously ill is like.

Yes, being ill takes a lot of time. Yes, being ill colors every part of your life.

But it wasn't nothing.

And damn, I hate it when people act like everything that happened during that period was worthless. Because I wasn't healthy.

Yeah, bite me.

(And just for your viewing pleasure, here's one of the best pictures of me I've seen in a long time... Yes, I know it's the back of my head, but still... I really like it.)

Proof is in the Pudding

Despite the title, I didn't actually have any pudding this week.

Instead, I had:

Macaroni and cheese (box style, the kind with the squeeze packet of cheese)
Chocolate Chip Cookies
100 Calorie packs with honey wheat pringle sticks
Sandwiches on potato bread
Bread crumbs
White pasta
Crescent dinner rolls
Rice cakes with chocolate mint drizzle

I wish I could have enjoyed it more.

I've been trying really hard not to write much recently. Doesn't that seem silly? I mean, this is my blog, and you all come because you like to read what I have to say.

Truth is, I've been sort of ashamed.

I'm sure I've told you all that I'm manic/depressive. Mostly, I have it under control by simple tracking. There are certain things I habitually do when I'm getting ready to go into a downward spiral. (The big one is scratching. When I get upset, I start scratching my legs. During really bad periods, I've been known to actually draw blood. And, just so you know, human fingernails are filthy-dirty even under the best of circumstances, and I usually end up getting those scratches infected. Loads of fun!)

I used to be on medication to regulate my moods, with sedatives prescribed for me when I would have panic attacks.

Have you ever had a panic attack? I don't recommend them for a fun time.

It's been a long time since I've had a really bad one; as a matter of fact, the last time I was having them regularly, they got thrown to the side after I was involved in an actual situation worthy of panic. My mother and I were at a junk shop to sell some action figures and other collectibles when an irate customer came in, started throwing things and screaming at the manager, and threw the manager around into some of his displays and - worst of all - was between us and the way out of the shop! I ended up having to dry swallow my medication because he was frightening me so badly that I couldn't breathe. After that, I didn't have another one for years. Guess my body figured that it didn't need to bother manufacturing panic after that.

I wonder if I could replicate that experience... I could go down to Church Street at 3 a.m....

Not that I'm seriously considering putting myself in an actual dangerous situation.

Well, not really.

The last two weeks have been, in a word, hellish.

I've had panic attacks so bad that I get muscle cramps in my back, sobbing fits that leave me breathless and coping with the very worst headaches. I either can't sleep at all, or I can't seem to wake all the way up. I can't focus on anything. All my projects and obligations have been left undone.

I've been angry and upset, lonely and yet irritable around people. The few times I've been forced by prior commitment to be social, I've been pretending. Honestly, if you asked me to relate an anecdote from those times, I wouldn't be able to produce one. I can't remember what I said, or did. If anyone's noticed, they've been too polite to say anything.

It's been a long, long time since I've been this deep into my depression. And this is probably the first time in my life that I've managed not to engage in self-destruction. Usually, when these periods get particularly bad, I do something crazy. I don't pay the bills for months at a time, hiding the bills and pretending everything is fine. Or I go out and have an affair. There's something heady and wonderful about the sensation of falling in love (even if Love isn't what you're in at all) that provides relief against the bone-crushing darkness.

I haven't done any of that. I've just pulled away from the world. Emails go unanswered. My email game is languishing in my benign neglect. I haven't cleaned the house. Mostly, I've just sat around, watched TV, and read myself insensible.

I'm still working on coming out of it, but I think I am. Finally.

I gained weight this week, .8 pounds... and yet, it wasn't as bad as I was afraid it would be. I could have so easily just kissed off my eating plan for the last few weeks. God knows, there were times when I wanted to. Where the quick, easy relief of chocolate or ice cream would have helped me, brought my mood to closer shallows...

And I didn't.

That's worth remembering.

I gained weight this week. I'm not entirely happy about this. And yet, I know where it happened. White bread and I don't get along, no matter how much I love it. Processed food with its high sodium content doesn't help me. Forsaking my water in favor of diet soda doesn't help. But these are normal things. It's normal eating and normal weight gain. (Also, if my numbers are correct, this is my ovulation period... unlike a lot of women who bloat up around their time of the month, I have a weight-spike about 2 weeks beforehand...)

When I first started weight watchers, I was scared that I would never be able to do this automatically. That I would always be vaguely confused and sure I wasn't eating quite right, or that I wouldn't be able to follow the plan for the rest of my life. And yet, when I couldn't manage anything else in my life, I didn't go crazy with the eating.

That's worth remembering.

I can do this, even under the worst possible circumstances. This is maintainable, not just for the immediate weight loss, but for life.

Running on Empty

This week would not be what one might describe as "On Plan."

In fact, Not Even Remotely might be a good descriptor.

Can we take a minute to discuss my loathing of the phrase "I cheated on my diet..."

Cheating, to me, implies breaking the rules with the intent of winning through unfair means.

[Complete and total digression here.... my father has a comic strip magnetted to his refrigerator. It's of a baseball game. The first frame has the pitch. The second frame has the umpire yelling "Foul! There's a foreign matter on this ball!" The pitcher says "What's foreign?" The last frame has the umpire yelling "Foreign is Sushi!" That comic has been on my father's fridge for 20+ years now. I didn't get it when he first put it up. I don't get it now. But it does sort of pop into my head from time to time to puzzle me exceedingly.]

Forgive me, I've been (and still am) sick. Digressions become more frequent with me the less restful sleep I've been getting.

Back to cheating... When you cheat at cards, what are you doing? Trying to win a game when the rules of the game say that you should lose. I had a friend in high school who loved to cheat at cards - particularly solitaire. She flipped cards 1... 2... 3... the way you normally would, the first time she ran through the stack... when she started running low on cards, she did an alternate shuffle that moved the cards into her hand 2.... 1 behind the 2.... 3.... she still lost from time to time. But she won more games than she lost. She was really quite defensive when I pointed out to her that she was cheating.

"I'm only playing myself," she said. "How can I cheat myself? What possible difference does it make?"

"Well, I know you're a liar," I said. "And so do you. Don't you think your self-respect is worth more than that?"

So... if cheating is a way to win by breaking the rules, it is, therefore, impossible to cheat on a diet. Since, you know, cheating on your diet actually prevents you from winning. (Or losing, as the case may be!) Eating foods that are off plan, or in amounts that are off plan isn't cheating. It's just eating... and it's not going to help you lose weight. I'm not even willing to say that Gastric Bypass or lipo are cheating... since those procedures have different risks and temptations and expenses that make losing weight through those methods just as fraught with peril, temptation, and self-remorse/self-disgust as any other options.

There is no cheat; there is only lie.

Now lying... that's something I understand.

I try not to lie to other people too much - it's too freaking hard to keep track of. You have to remember what you told, and more importantly, to whom. And then you have to worry about whether person A who thinks one thing will talk to Person B who knows something else entirely... You end up having to be involved in conversations that you have no interest in, so that you're there to turn a conversation aside from a topic that you don't want them wandering into... it's a lot of work, and in the end, it's not worth it at all. Trust me. (Oh, sweet irony, how I love you!) But I lie to myself all the time. I've been lying to myself for years. "Oh, I don't look that bad..."

The biggest lie I've told myself, though, was this. "As a chronic asthmatic, I'm not going to live very long. I may as well enjoy eating, since I'm living on borrowed time anyway."

I'm 36 years old.

I was never expecting to live past 35.

I was certainly never expecting to live without my inhaler inches from my fingertips. Without the near consistent trips to the hospital every 6 weeks. Without waking in the night, gasping for breath. Without pausing in the middle of marital activities to grope lovingly for my nebulizer saying, "Hold that thought, would you, Thomas?" Not being able to laugh freely, for fear of sending myself into an asthma attack. I vividly remember a trip to watch fireworks with some friends, and we had to walk about a mile from where we parked to where we could see, and I had to stop every quarter mile to rest and use my inhaler. By the time we got there, I was shaking from the effects of too much albuterol. I vaguely remember my husband and my best friend joking about something to do with biting, but that's all... I can't remember the fireworks, I can't remember any conversation... just this nagging, low grade fear, nearly buried in the back of my brain while the front tried to keep on breathing. I am going to die like this.

Jeez, was that a digression worthy of a politician or what?

All of this boils down to nothing more than a long self-defense of my eating habits for the last - is it Friday already? Shit! - six days.

I have NOT been eating On Plan this week. I have NOT been exercising. I have NOT been drinking water. Almost a whole week at this point, and there's the snarky side of myself that wants to say "Well, shit, you've been Off Plan most of the week, may as well just finish the week off, right?" The sick part of me says, "Plan whatever you want, I'm having nothing to do with any of you, so just shut up and go away."

On the plus side (bah, I want to get OUT of the plus sized clothing, thanks awfully!) it's not that I've been over-indulging. It's that I simply have not been eating. If I'm lucky, I've been getting in ~800 calories a day. Maybe 2 waters, but mostly soda. (For some reason, swallowing water makes my throat hurt worse, and as I currently feel like I swallowed a bookcase. Sideways! I'm just not up to water. Soda. Or hot tea/coffee.) I haven't been eating my veggies either - partially because my tooth still hurts a bit (that's at least finally getting better!) and partially because I just DON'T WANT TO. So there!

Yesterday was the closest to On Plan that I've been since Saturday. And I'm still off by 3 waters and an oil.

You know the worst thing about all this? I'm sick. That's not an "excuse", that's not a "justification", I'm not "rationalizing" or "in denial." It's a freaking FACT. I'm sick.

So why the hell am I feeling guilty about my eating? (or lack thereof) Jeeeeeeeeez!

I did my measurements today. It's been about a month since the last time.

Upper Arm: 12 inches. (stayed the same)
Waist: 38 inches (down 1 1/2 inches)
Hips: 43 1/2 inches (down 2 1/2 inches)
Thigh: 23 (down 3/4 inch)

So, that's 4 3/4 inches lost this month. And adding up all my losses, I've lost 6.8 pounds in April.


Time to get philosophical about it. I've been saying it to other people for a while now, so it's time to take my own damn advise.

Scratch dirt over that day, it's done. Start again today.

(I'll try. But I'm still sick, so I may have to scratch dirt over today, too... I'd better get better soon, though, because I'm seriously running on empty right now.)

I Am Taurus; Hear Me Roar

Myspace Layouts


I am such a Taurus, too... with a few exceptions. My husband (an Aries) and I have gotten our main characteristics reversed... he's the introvert, and I'm the extrovert. Aside from that, yeah, you could use the Taurus characterizations as a check list.

Stubborn. Bull-headed. Tenacious. Whatever you want to call it, that's me in a nutshell. (My dad says "tenacious" sounds better, but bull-headed tends to suit me...)

While I'm always enamored with the idea of self-doubt, I get really, highly offended when other people doubt me. When my father gave us the 10 week coupons, I seriously doubt that he thought he'd have to buy a second set. And here we are, sneaking up on needing a third set...

And this weekend, when we were down at Aunt Gayle's? We were talking about Weight Watchers and my plans and goals. She asked me how much I was planning to lose, and I said I'd like to get down to about 125 - 130 pounds or so. Aunt Gayle tried to hide it, but the look she gave me (covered up quickly) was flat disbelief.

"Well," she said, "that's quite a goal."

I fumed. Quietly, but fumed, nonetheless.

It's probably shallow of me, but nothing makes me angrier than someone who doesn't believe I can do it... whatever "it" is. All it does is make me even more determined to get it done.

Which is good, because my motivation has been flagging a little. My root canal got infected, and the infection had spread; now I have an infected tooth, sinus infection, and my eye is infected, too. I can't sleep for more than about an hour before waking up again with a stuffed head, or shooting pains in my mouth, or discovering that my eye is all crusted shut again. YUCK! My knees are finally getting better so I can think about running again, but I'm too sick to even think about going out for a walk. It's all very discouraging.

I swear, it's a curse. Thomas takes time off from work, and someone gets sick.

Tomorrow's my birthday. We were going to do something; Thomas has taken the day off. And now, I'm pretty sure that what Thomas is going to be doing tomorrow is babysitting Darcy while I sleep all day. How exciting.

On the other hand, I'm still a Taurus, and being mad and determined to prove Aunt Gayle wrong will still be around when I get better.

The Hives and the Hive-Knots

So yesterday was a complete wash.

First off, the child thing has started becoming a little more self-sufficient. She gets up in the morning and goes to the bathroom, gets herself a cup of milk or juice, and a bowl of cereal, then settles into the living room to play on her computer.

This is all wonderful and great, except that she used to come wake me up first, and now she doesn't. And with all the housecleaning and exercise and stuff I've been doing, I sleep more soundly than I used to (particularly after a late night raiding session, and Thomas and I talking until 1 or 2 in the morning...). All of which means that I've actually been waking up much later than my normal ~8am. Yesterday I slept until almost 10. Yeah, I know, you could kill me... it's ok for you to feel that way.

The problem is that I have a fairly packed schedule and when I get up at 10am, I'm seriously behind already. Add in that I had to have a root canal yesterday, and I got a lot of nothing done.

Well, that's not entirely true. I got the dishes done before I had to leave for the dentist's. (And ended up getting stuck in a bridge opening on the way there AND back... too many damn boats in this area, I swear!) I ended up getting to the dentist's about three minutes late, which wasn't too much of a big deal, since he was running behind, and I didn't actually get into the chair until almost 12:40. The actual root canal wasn't too bad and loads faster than the others I've had to get done... (for those of you tuning in late to this story, I didn't have dental insurance for the better part of eight years, and this is the fifth root canal I've gotten since finally getting insurance... I could have made a down-payment on a new car with the amount of cash we've thrown at my mouth, and there are days when I've debated the value of it...but there you have it.)

I must say that I do really like my dentist. We have a lot of interests in common (well, aside from the whole sticking ones hands into someone else's mouth... ) and often discuss books and movies while waiting for me to get numb.

I got home around 1:30 and made Thomas's lunch for the next day, had a bit of soup for lunch (the hot liquid really seems to help with my various dental aches...) and polished off an email I've been exchanging with Carol. We're having one of those long, drawn out email conversations that we probably ought to be having in person, but we just can't find the time. Working on our issues, and it's been long, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful, and reminds me of all the reasons that I love her so much to start with... and why even everything that we've been through together hasn't yet changed that.

I looked at my to-do list for yesterday and winced a few times. Sweeping the floor seemed like too much work. Writing emails for my various PBeM games was too taxing, and my head hurt. Working out? Out of the question. Especially since Tuesday and Thursdays are my cardio days, and I really, really hate cardio. (Chris Freytag: "Are you ready for a calorie-burning, heart-thumping workout?" Me: "No.") And I felt guilty about it.

My guilt was too great to get out of going for our evening walks; especially since Thomas will go without me if I slack off, and then Darcy will either go with him and whine incessantly that she wants her mommy, or she'll stay here with me and whine incessantly that her daddy is gone. She can be sort of clingy that way. In either case, I didn't want to put up with either the whining, or the feeling guilty.

So we walked.

In retrospect, it wasn't a good plan.

Less than a halfway through our walk, the Novocaine started wearing off and I had tingles in my mouth and up the side of my face as the nerves woke up. And then I got tingles in other places while my nervous system panicked about the unexpected removal of part of the system. Nerves: "Hey! Hey, FEET! Hello, way down there... I seem to be missing a tooth nerve. You don't happen to have it, do you?" Feet: " What the FUCK are you talking about, man? Tooth nerve? Shit. You couldn't find the ass with a map and a compass, what are you doing bothering us? Some people."

A few minutes after this random zotting and tingling in various places, the small temporary filling that my dentist put in fell out. I know this because I got a rush of clove oil into my mouth, which is what he stuffs the cavity with. YUCK. And... for reasons entirely unfathomable (or maybe it's just that my Nerves were upset after being told off by the Feet), I had a systemic reaction to this.

Hives.

Have you ever had them? They start sort of gradual... a raised welt along the back of your hand that itches. The tips of your ears get a little too warm. The throat tightens up just a bit... and then, like the inevitable tide, they spread. Welts form up your arms, down the back of your neck, along the stomach... down the legs. And everywhere it hits you, you itch like crazy. In the meanwhile, your breathing is obstructed, both because your throat is tight and because, wow, look at that! Your tongue is swelling! Isn't this FUN?

We're almost a mile from the apartment.

Over the last few weeks since I bought new pants, they've gotten looser. I've taken to wearing a belt. I stop to let my belt out a few notches. The jean material of my pants is taut across my thighs as my legs swell up. There is a sudden flare of pain in my hand as my rings cut off blood flow to my fingers.

We keep walking. What else is there to do? It's hives. By the time Thomas ran home and got the car, it'll be over.

Walking is an exquisite sort of torture; delicate and insidious. I'm constantly rubbing the backs of my hands against my jeans, trying to ignore the other various tingles and itches and pains. The base of my spine burns.

"You know," I say to Thomas, "I had considered doing my first C25K run after I got home on the idea that if my first run was after a root canal, none of the other runs after that could possibly be worse."

We finally get home and I take a double dose of benadryl liquid. Thomas, who has recently gotten obsessed with the idea of buying an iPod Touch, drags me back out of the house to go shopping with him. My legs are still swollen and walking is painful and exhausting, but off we go, to both the Best Buy and the Circuit City. (What is is about the double letter electronics stores? I mean, next we'll get a chain called All Appliances!) He asks if I have an opinion about which mp3 player he gets. I don't. I could care less, really. I personally don't think either of us need one, and all I really want to do is go lay down somewhere.

Eventually, we go back home. Thomas buys an iPod Touch, and as a sort of weird afterthought, decides to buy me an iPod Shuffle (in green.) No, I don't know why I need one, but that's ok, I'll use it for my C25K runs...

The benadryl has finally kicked in, and I've stopped swelling up like some grotesque Macy's Day parade balloon, and now I'm really, really sleepy. I make some vague effort to continue life as normal, but can't quite manage it. I go into the bedroom, fall over and die for the next three and a half hours.

As I'm fading off to sleep, I wonder why I'm so hard on myself. I would never expect anyone else to keep up with their work and social obligations after a root canal.

And yet, when I got up at 9:30, and Thomas is on a raid with the guild, complaining about the few non-guildies they had to pull in to get up to the needed 25 to run a raid, I feel a twist of guilt that I wasn't able to get it together enough to show for the raid. I also feel some massive pains in my legs. Apparently, walking around so much while I had hives has knotted up my thighs.

They still hurt.

Sigh.

Missing in Action

[For those of you checking in for Healthy You Challenge, I am down another .6 pounds, for a total of 5.6 pounds lost since January 2nd. I also managed to have a good meeting, did not cry/bitch/whine/pule or otherwise annoy Thomas. Which is good, because he's got a new and difference annoyance. His company, Evil French Corporation (or EFC for short), did a reorg, dividing the company into a couple of segments, IT Architecture and IT Operations... this put Thomas squarely reporting directly to the Director of ITA, Brent.

Thomas hates Brent. And has, pretty much for the better part of a year. Brent has a tendency to say he's going to do a thing, forget that he said it, deny that he said it, and blame someone else for not getting it done, particularly when that someone is on vacation or having a work from home day and cannot immediately counter the denial. Thomas ran into this problem at least four times while working on the server transfer thing last year. Fortunately, his old boss didn't believe that Thomas would do something so stupid, called him on the phone, and conferenced him in with Brent while they discussed it. Brent was forced to admit (since Thomas is a rabid email collector and keeps all his meeting notes) to admit he'd just forgotten about it, which made him look bad, and did not exactly endear Thomas to him.

I forsee... more months of having a pissy spouse. Oh. Joi.

But Thomas lost 2 pounds this week, bringing his total up to 7.4 lost.

As a side, side note, I seem to have come down with a stomach bug of some sort or other. I woke up last night at 3am with serious stomach pains. Around 3:30, I started throwing up, which I did on and off until 5. Then I took a shower and crawled back into bed at 5:45.]

You wouldn't know it to look at me now, but I was quite the tomboy when I was growing up. Fed up with the older girls who snubbed my "New York" accent and my dubious fashion sense (you try buying your own clothes on an allowance of $10 a week that also has to pay for your school lunch, books, toys, and entertainment, and see how fashionable YOU are) my best friends were the younger brothers and cousins. I was a huge Star Wars fan and had two cases of little plastic action figures. My best friends were Curtis, Benji, and Kevin, all of them two to four years younger than I... we climbed trees and dug an elaborate Hoth Ice cavern under the roots of this ancient beech tree (In retrospect, we're probably damn lucky that the tree didn't lean slightly to the left and collapse on us, as we dug out at least half of its root structure.) and rode bikes (I remember a particularly bad accident when Kevin was looking behind him and ran front ways into a car - which had stopped, but couldn't exactly get out of the way - and broke his arm) and screamed and yelled and generally acted the bohemians.

I would throw my books down as soon as I got home from school and then I was outside from then until dark. Then Curtis's parents got divorced and his mom moved across town. So I only saw him occasionally at school. And then Benji's parents got a new house and moved away. I don't know that I ever saw him again. And then Kevin wasn't allowed to play with me anymore because his sister set fire to the shed in the back of the house, and somehow I got blamed for this. I'm not entirely sure why that happened. I mean, I know why the fire happened. Deedee was smoking in the shed (It was something I did with her from time to time, even though I really didn't like her much... but I started smoking when I was ten, and she was the only other person I knew who did...) and didn't snub her butt well. I had been in the shed earlier that day, and I know someone saw me. But I hadn't smoked that day, I'd just gone in to grab my comic books that I'd left in there the day before. No one could prove that I'd started the fire, but likewise, Deedee was not about to admit that she'd done it. So, I didn't get in trouble about it, exactly. I just wasn't allowed over anymore. Which was mostly ok, since of the three boys, Kevin had been the one I liked least anyway. And it hadn't been much fun, just the two of us, playing, as it had been when it was the four of us. I was philosophical about my loss.

After that, though, the only people in the neighborhood for me to be friends with were all the girls. The boyfriended, kissing-obsessed, fashion magazine, who's too fat, have you gotten your period yet?, have you ever kissed a boy, not THAT boy! my gahd! what size bra do you wear, oh, well mine's BIGGER, girls. Girls who didn't know who Han Solo was, who thought Luke was one of the Dukes of Hazzard, who were not at all interested in climbing a tree, or heaven forfend, getting dirty.

Ick. I might have spent a little too much time with boys at that point, as my first thoughts on this development were "My god, girls DO have cooties."

I started staying home in the afternoon after school. I read voraciously. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, and (forgive me) Sweet Valley High. But it was ok. I was still active during the summer. My parents always shipped me off to my grandparents during the summer. From the end of school, to the beginning of school, I was in New York. And not the city part. My grandparents lived about 10 miles from the Canadian border, on a big farm. There were woods to play in, and streams to fall in, and horses to ride, and chickens to chase, and apples to steal and the playground was right across the street in case of failing imagination, my cousins and I could always run about on the swings and slides and monkey bars. We biked or rollerskated down to the local corner store (about a mile and a half away). And when we weren't at the farm, we were at Camp, my grandparents lake house in the Adirondacks, where we swam all day or canoed around or ran around in those woods and climbed up on enormous glacier-moved boulders that seems to be dotted across the woodlands. My favorite boulder was somewhat larger than a house, easily climbable and actually had a tree growing on top of it.

When I went off to college, I signed up for the most interesting Phys Ed classes I could. Adventure Games and Introduction to Rock Climbing. (The advanced rock climbing class wasn't really a class per se, it was a week long trip during spring break to go climbing and camping).

Adventure games was a blast. We did rappelling down the sides of school buildings, we did an obstacle course set up in the tops of trees, some twenty feet above ground. We did canoe racing (and sinking each other's canoes) and played paintball, and took a zipcord across the lake. We took two classes worth of fencing lessons. We did a day's worth of archery.

Rock Climbing was also fun - it didn't hurt that my partner for rock climbing was Latney, who was just about the most lovely man I'd ever met. He was charming and good looking and athletic and fun. We did more rappelling down the sides of buildings, and we practiced climbing up the rock wall in the gym. Then, over fall break, we went on a trip to the mountains, where we put our practice to practical and climbed up several cliff faces. It was freezing the weekend we went, and I'd forgotten to buy gloves. Kim, our instructor, was very pleased with me when I'd managed a crack-climb of about thirty feet, which quickly dissolved into rage when he saw my hands. A crack-climb involves wedging your fingers into a split in the rock and leaning back, putting most of your weight on your feet and your hands, pulling yourself up manually, and then re-positioning your fingers. I'd torn all the skin off the back of my hands, and hadn't realized it because it was so bloody cold. What I said in retrospect about that weekend was that I'd never had so much fun being entirely miserable.

So... the question I'm wondering is... Where did that girl go? She just seemed to fade away, some time after my sophomore year of college. Was she a casualty of war; my parents got divorced (finally) and I got married and then divorced (inside of eight months, even!). I developed my first case of adult asthma and ended up in the ER nine times in six months. I was put on steroids. My bike got stolen. My mom let me bring the car to college. I got a job working at the candy shop (where you could eat all you wanted out of the bin candies - since they knew we were going to do it anyway...).

That girl, the one who used to ride horses in competition... the one who was the first to go face-down rappelling off the side of the gym and who grinned at her classmates cheering her on... the one who could climb up the pine tree next to her house, edge out on a narrow branch and drop onto the roof (but only when her mom wasn't home...) The one who spent extra babysitting money on a bike, rather than a book...

Have you seen her? Because really... I miss her a lot.

Doesn't Take Long

So I've missed my first walk. Well, technically my third walk.

On the other hand, I had a lovely excuse. Friday night, my husband and I both came down with a nasty case of (suspected) food poisoning or some other nasty virus thing. In either case, neither of us was up to walking at all, any further than from the living room to the bathroom, or back to bed.

We spent most of our time passing each other in our activities. He'd be computer gaming and I'd be asleep. I'd get up, log in, and he'd decide to go take a nap which means that we spent the whole weekend not actually seeing each other much. On the plus side, Darcy didn't catch it (or eat whatever we ate... Thomas is holding out for bad Chinese food, but I'm not so sure) so we didn't have to deal with a cranky, sick four year old...

And I suppose it's not so bad, because while we didn't walk, neither of us ate much all weekend either.