Stupid things.

Dear Diary,


So, I've apparently gained 10 lb. of weight? Plllttt. This is bad. This is very, very bad. This time last year, I was at 146 lb.. Now I'm at 156. Luckily, I never did completely finish getting my clothes tailored. They were somewhat loose, so they fit fine now.

I blame weight watchers, and their stupid new points plus program. I was doing well, and they changed it.
Stupid weight watchers.

(of course, I have slacked off my training seriously since early summer, but yes, let's blame weight watchers.)

I need to get moving. Since I can't do any log distance running for several weeks, I'm looking at the p90 exercise system. I may be modifying it as my ankle heals. I'm also planning to do some walking on the treadmill to see what I can do and how long I can do it.

Those are not, by the way, my hairy legs.

Why am I having these thoughts today? Because lots of people I know are running the Duke City Marathon now. RIGHT now. And me, I'm sitting here with my stupid ankle, I thought I might be able to pull it off and maybe do the half, but as soon as I thought that, the swelling went away. Turns out the swelling was keeping it from hurting. It also hid most of the bruising. My foot is bruised, on top, near the front, and my leg, all around, well above my ankle.  I can walk on it, but I can't touch it, it's tender.

Well, yesterday Sweet Baboo and some other guardsmen discovered a small, blind, female neonate. She's calico and at most four weeks old. I'm not sure how this scenario will turn out. She's completely blind, and I have a dog that thinks that everything small and furry is a chew toy.  She was in bad shape, barely moving when they found her, and refusing all food.  After wrestling with a tiny bottle (seriously, I put huge holes in this tiny nipple, but nothing will come out) I contacted DP, who is one cat away from being a genuine cat lady, who advised us.

Sweet Baboo started dipping his finger into kitty formula (yes, there is such a thing, available at the pet store) and smearing it on her muzzle.  She licked it off, and then eventually she started licking it off his finger.  When I came home, we got her to transition to lapping it from a small jar lid or a spoon.  Now she's climbing out of every box I try to put her in.

I carry her around the house in a favorite scarf that I have fashioned into a sling. She's very sweet.

My ankle is still stupid. And I still feel fat.

Stupid ankle. Stupid Weight Watchers.

Nice kitty.
...

6 reasons to hate me, and 6 to tolerate me, and one neutral.

Dear Diary,

 

13.  My fall clothes are unfathomably baggy.  When I put on belts, the waists pucker up like a paper bag.  I absolutely have to take them to the tailor.  It's ridiculous.

 

This is what an agorophobic 19-mile run
looks like.

12.  I'm having some slight twinges of agoraphobia lately. I did a 19-mile long run last week without ever being more than 2.5 miles from my house.  Beat That.

 

11.  My vacation days were approved for the trip to Seattle.  I only have a couple vacation days, the rest I'm comping by working a couple saturdays.  I found some walking tours on the Frommers web site that look like fun.  (and, there's always the original Starbucks, the holy grail of caffein addicts everywhere.I also found a podcast audio tour of the Japanese Gardens.

This will be a relaxed vaca with just me and the Sweet Baboo, with that 50k in the middle of it.

  

10. The water's too cold to swim there.  I haven't been open water swimming in ages, and I miss it. 

 

9. My mother in law is coming soon for a week.  Have I mentioned my MIL and what a peach she is?  You hear all sorts of horror stories about MILs, that they meddle, they're bossy, etc.  Not mine.  She's restful and relaxed, and just goes with the flow. 

 

8. Seaman Jon, who is no longer a seaman but just Jon, returns home in November. He has been in jail for the past ten months.  I won't go into any more detail than that.  But at least I can stop worrying, and hopefully, he will get on with his life and head in a positive direction. 

 

7.  It's fall here.  The heat wave is over.  The mornings are crisp and cold.  The afternoons are warm and breezy.

 

6.  My oldest son turns 27 soon.  Twenty.  Seven.  I also noticed that I'm meeting parents that were born the year I graduated from high school.  Yeeikes.

 

5.  Sweet Baboo uses his Starbucks card.  A LOT. It gives him discounts, after all, over using any other form of payment for his quad-venti-nonfat-halzelnut-100-degree-latte.  He uses it so much that twice a month he gets a coupon for a free drink, any drink, which he then gives to me.  So at any given time, I have coupons for free drinks sitting in the side pocket in my car, and I can pull over and get my double-tall-nonfat-salted-carmel-100-degree-mocha.  For free. 

 

4.  I'm trying the 2-week Special K challenge. I know, crash diets are ridiculous.  I'm just doing it to make up for the two weeks of crappy eating the month before.   Of course today I'm carb loading for the Bear Chase 50K on Sunday.  Or something.

 

3.  While in Seattle, we're hoping to be able to make it up to Grouse Mountain (thanks, Becks!) for a hike to the top (the Grouse Grind) and to do something called "ziplining" around the top.

 

2.  I'll be ditching WW after this next week, once I've copied over all my favorite WW recipes.  I wrote them a letter telling me why.  They sent a fairly non-commital response. (Are you sure you checked the Frequently Asked Questions?)  yes, I'm sure.

• a) I bought four old WW cookbooks with the old points values in them online, at Amazon. 
• b) I downloaded three apps.  iTrackBites - so far, so good; and GoMealsHD.  I have to use the second to calculate the calories, fat, and fiber in my meals, and then I use the calculator in iTrackBites and record it.  They don't say "points," because that would be a trademart violation, so they call them "bites".  I am also loking at iWatchr. 
• c) I will have the AllrecipesPro app, which I adore.  I'll be loading in recipes from the cookbooks into that, because it also calculates calories, fat, and fiber as well as allows you to do menu planning, in which it dumps all the ingredients for the meals you plan to make into a shopping list.

 

1.  I'm also having some problems with depression lately.  It comes and goes.  Thankfully, I can run.  When I run, it goes away.  So does a Chinese super buffet.  But that's another story.

 

...

During Pictures. Again.

This is my friend Sharon. We went to high school together in Richardson, Texas. It's freaky that I am old enough to have had the same friend for nearly 30 years. I met her in 9th grade in Algebra class. As one of many kids do not reach abstract thinking by 9th grade, she struggled. She's smart, always did her homework, but her brain just wasn't ready for Algebra in 1980.

I sat in the back of class and read, notably the trashy Flowers in the Attic series, never doing any classwork or homework. From time-to-time, I'd glance at the overhead projector screen, and it always made sense to me, and return to my book. I was not a good girl, like Sharon. But, I got As on all my tests. Mr. Ayers had learned early on that it was just best to leave me be. (I've paid my dues since then, obviously.)

I let Sharon cheat off me during tests. Then Mr. Ayers started handing out two versions of each test, so, she then she'd just hand me her test when he wasn't looking, I would do the problems lightly in pencil, and hand them back. She wound up passing Algebra. But before you think less of her, the story has an ethical and happy ending: Sharon, with her low threshold of guilt, retook Algebra a couple years later IN SUMMER SCHOOL, to make sure she understood it. She got an A. I thought she was crazy for doing that, but now I'm proud to have a friend who recognizes that there are no short cuts.

Sharon graduated in the top 10% of our 1983 class (over 600 kids graduated). I graduated in the lowest 10%. I'm not making this up. It caused a great deal of distress and angst - in my parents, not me. Sharon went on to college, then established her career, then marriage, then children. I, or course, did things is a slightly different order. Sharon worked for the Forest Service for a long time, before changing her focus to start her own business as a landscape designer and be home for her kids.

Sharon has always had a problem with her weight, in that she had difficulty gaining it. She suspects an overactive thyroid. I never had much problem with my weight until later on. I joked with her earlier this week that if would could somehow average our bodies, we'd make two normal people.

Sharon is more or less intruigued by my interest in multisport insanity, the way one is intruigued by a friend who has become involved in some sort of weird cult. Not enough to be involved in it herself, just interesting to watch.

In any case, look at me. Just LOOK at me. All of me. This is going to be my before picture, although, in this entire journey, perhaps it's more of a "DURING" picture. I know that for me, two things work:

1) I MUST track my food. If I don't, it's too easy for me to just start eating, eating, eating and the next thing I know I'm downing a few thou calories a day.

2) I have to have a program that lets me "earn" extra calories for doing exercise. On this day, we climbed a small hill behind my house called, "The U mound" (seen in the background of the picture of me, above) and I was distressingly breathless. I even had to stop once or twice to catch my breath. Time to get my butt in gear.

Last night, Baboo and I signed up for the AtomicMan Duathlon, near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

I've done this before, always the "Little Boy" course. (Yes, the two distances are charmingly named after the two atomic bombs that ended WWII) The little boy course is 5K run, 20K bike, and then a 4K run. The bike is hilly, on mountain roads with sharp turns and steep climbs.

The "Fat Man" course is a 10K run, 40K bike (including going down and then back up out of a canyon) and then a 5K run. It is essentially an Olympic triathlon with the swim having been replaced by a 5K run.

So guess which distance I signed up for. In two weeks. I expect to die around noon that day.

Hopefully, I won't, because these last pictures of my big fat butt are not what I want in a frame next to my casket.

...

Found. Eaten. Oh, Help me!

Found this at the grocery store today. i went int there to get some fat-free frozen yogurt.

yeah. So...

Have I ever mentioned how much I LLLlllllooooooove coconut? I even have coconut cologne that my daughter bought me from Bath and Body works

Oh, boy....

The fact that this stuff exists means that the world has become a very dangerous place.

...

Strength training observations

Ever do a new strength workout for the first time? You know the kind - you do it for the first time and are sharply reminded that you are NOT STRONG.

I did the Wednesday circuit class for the second time tonight. It left me all weak, sweaty, and trembling. Not the attractive, come-hither kind of weak, sweaty trembling. The smelly, dizzy kind of woman.

Anyhoo, I've discovered several things about my fitness, particularly when it comes to strength:

1) I'm hoping I looked just like this -->

2) My upper body strength is for $hit. I am the original 160-pound weakling. I started out doing things with 8 pound hand weights, and promptly switched to 5 pound weights after nearly hitting myself in the head with one. At one point, I switched to nothing. That's right, I was pumping some serious air, y'all.

3) I cannot do a pushup. Not that I didn't try: I assumed the plank position, and did one pushup.
Then I had to hit the mat with my knees to do two more. I had to stuck my big butt WAYYYYY up in the air in what I'm sure was a very attractive series of pushups, pausing between each one long enough to catch my breath, okay, pant deeply--OH and for future reference, do not ever look back to see what you look like in the mirrors that line the wall of the studio when you're in this position.
Just. Don't.

4) I respond very well to group pressure, even imagined group pressure. This particular teacher, when we didn't call out the number of whatever-we-were-doing-at-the-time reps loudly enough, would threaten to give us more to do, and we/I would hastily comply by yelling out as loudly as I/we could, even while the small, still, rational voice in my head was saying, "I'm a grownup. She can't make me do them."
No matter. I was taking no chances.

5) I probably look more like this -->

6) Oh, and here's a weird observation: whenever I see someone who's as heavy as I used to be in the locker room, changing off in the corner or the shower, hoping nobody will see her changing, I want to go and give her a big hug.
Is that weird? I want to tell her how great it is that she's here and that is she keeps at it, she'll feel better about herself. I want to, but I don't.
I'm afraid that I'll come off as condescending.

So I guess my goals are to do a real pushup and maybe use the medium weights in class. And maybe get up the courage to say something encouraging to those girls I see hiding in the corner in the locker room.

...