Updates.

BAD EATING HABITS: Since I'm big impulsive baby and MUST track my eating, I've taken the advice of several and joined The Daily Plate. It's just obsessive enough, and adds calories burned while training to my daily allotment. Both TDP and my endocrinologist agree 1400 calories is my limit, with allowances for extra activity.

THAT THYROID THING: After 2 weeks of Synthroid, I feel pretty good, and don't have a desperately exhausted feeling immediately after waking up. I seem to have more motivation for working out. If I can get my grown daughter and cats to stop waking me up, I'll have even MORE energy.

WORKOUTS: I'm doing resistance training. I'm self-conscious working out in front of Sweet Baboo; isn't that weird? I'm SO GLAD days are longer! Last night, I had an awesome, short trail run, the first good one I've had in a while. I'll be training for Ironman 70.3 Buffalo Springs Lake and the Tahoe Rim Trail 50K. I'll be back in the back-of-the-pack in no time. Today, I did 9 pushups. I've never done that many all at once before, and my butt was only slighyly up in the air. Then my arms gave out and I almost broke my nose. I assume that's what they mean by "working to failure".

HAIR: My hair is growing out. Soon, I will have ponytails again. You don't care, and that's okay. I do.

SOCIAL WORK SCHOOL: When I'm done, I'm never going to school again. No, seriously. I mean it. I do.

NEW JOB: It's psychiatric research, and it's very interesting. Sometimes Sweet Baboo pops in and talks with me for a few minutes when he's not insanely busy with his new job. At my other, part-time job, I developed and am now giving a combination parenting skills class and support group on one evening a week, and also have a couple of individual clients. Once I'm done with social work school, I'll hopefully be doing a combination of case-management and therapy during the day, and all my evenings will be free.

CHILDREN: My youngest teenage son is dangling precariously between graduating and having to take a class in summer school to graduate. Because he's TRYING TO KILL ME. My daughter has been calling me VERY LATE at night to vent her drama, which is never an emergency. I asked her many times not to do this, then went into my settings and set her ringtone to silence.
Betcha didn't know you could do this, did you? You're welcome.

...

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.

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New House Pictures, Part 1: Kitchen

These are my chickens.  They sit in the corner of my kitchen and watch me cook.  

For some reason I cannot explain, they are one of the few cluttery things in my kitchen that I allow.  I don't like a lot of decoration in my kitchen because it's a workspace for me, and the more pretty stuff there is in there, the more I have to clean.  Except for the chickens.  Which make the food turn out better.  They must, because I insist on having them in my kitchen.  I love my chickens.  Whenever I see one I don't have, I buy it.  I've bought them at souvenire stands, local shops, and off EBay.  I haven't seen a new one in a while.  

So here are some pictures of the new house that I've gone on and on and on about.  Now, the previous owner had this whole, dried-flowers-and-bundles-of-trigs-English-cottage-garden thing happening. I'm not SAYING THAT ANYTHING IS WRONG WITH THAT; I'm just not into the whole, "Martha Stewart threw up here" look. 

At first I hated this kitchen island. Now, I use it every. Single. Day.  The bouquet of flowers usually sits on the wood stove, but I move it when Baboo makes a fire.

But back to the cottage garden thing, and why I hated it.  Well, for one thing, I avoid things that collect dust and cobwebs and crumble when you breathe on them.  There's that.   

But the other thing that the whole "cottage garden" look is just weird in this particular house which is, I mean.  C'mon.  In the DESERT.  

And, plus, it's a ranch house. It was built in the 80s, but it's more of a mid-century type tract home. 

AND, it's about a mile off old route 66.  How can you not want to have fun with that, and fill your house with all kinds of funky midcentury junk?

Baboo and I are kind of eclectic, but in honor of the home's style and location I've decided to fill in the details with a few midcentury things here in there.  

I like kitch, even though I can't spell it.  I always have.  In the eighties and nineties I had things like pink flamingos in my yard, and my appliances were all ACTUAL things from the 60s and 50s that people had thrown out.  This, of course, made my mother recoil with horror because she despised everything that reminded her of the 60s and 50s as being "old" and "ugly".  My friends, who had dusty-rose carpeting and french-blue Tupperware, and those crappy chrome table-and-chair sets, were pretty horrified, too, by all my old garage sale "vintage" junk.  

I left most of it behind when I left South Dakota.  Except for one old chandelier, which I will be restoring one of these days soon.  

That's the beauty of decorating with junk.  You change your look, and you're not out much.  

In this kitchen, very soon, I'll be mounting some old postcards of Albuquerque.  They're mostly of old hotels along route 66 that are either not there any more, because they became nuisances and were seized by the city and razed, or they are still there but are still nuisances. Some have postmarks from the 40s on them, and messages to people who I'm sure are probably no longer with us.

Yes, that is a nook.  For some reason, Baboo was wild about this.  He said, "It will be just like eating in a restaurant!"  But then, I always do the cooking, so isn't EVERY day like eating in a restaurant for him?  I got this little condoment holder of him as joke (closeup in picture, below).  In it, we keep his beloved Chilula.  The table cloth is oilcloth, tan with cherries. DP suggested this.  I HEART my oilcloth table cloth.  The stained-glass window, which you can barely see, was made by my mother when I was fifteen, and I will not have a kitchen, anywhere, in which isn't hanging.  It hung in her kitchen until she died, and then I took it and it hangs in all my kitchens.

So, the light over the table.  I had to have this light.  I bought it from MoonShine Shades. 

The former light fixture was a weird, frosted bowl hanging from ornate, iron scrollwork underneath a halogen light.  It lured small flying bugs, then collected them when they died.  Then one day, I think it was DP who sent me a link to Meteor Lights, and I swooned.  I wound up choosing MoonShine over Meteor Lights because I liked their hanging assembly more.  

The table overlooks the back yard where a lot of birds congregate: scaled and mountain quail, scrub jays, an occasional marauding hawk, white-winged doves, towhees, finches, hummingbirds, and then there are the occasional bunnies.  So, along with salt&pepper, there is usually at least a couple pairs of binoculars on the table, which you can see in a basket on the right.

Lastly, here are the magnets.  

We collect one from every place we go - races, visits, whatever.  We love to travel, especially places off the major freeways that you'd otherwise miss.  We only collect it if we've actually been there, and the joy is in picking out the magnet.  There's quite a few of them from national parks thoughout the south west.  It's the one thing that we can collect as souvenires that doesn't take up too much space or collect too much dust.  

That's it, I guess.  I'll post some more pictures soon as I finish arranging and accessorizing the rest of the house.  

Dear Unfailingly Cheerful Volunteer Person;

Okay, I get it. You volunteer, and that's awesome. You clearly don't need to work full time, so you do something that gives you meaning and helps others. I am, truly, happy that you do that; in fact, it's something I often suggest to my clients who feel that their life has no meaning. You fulfill an important need here, and make lives easier for the patients.

Meanwhile, however, can I offer you some tips to ensure I don't wind up throwing my radio at you?

1) The reason I'm not smiling is because I'm concentrating on my job. I'm not unhappy, or sad, or angry, (and don't need cheering up) but I will be if you don't stop yelling SMILE!! at me every single time you see me, and then waiting to see if I comply.

2) I used to leave my door open, but now it's nearly shut for a reason. If I shut it all the way, then people who need to see me won't knock on it. It's not nearly shut so that you can peak in and start a conversation. If you don't have business with me, walk on by. And don't ever, ever knock on my door when it's closed.

3) I'm working. My employer doesn't pay me to chat about your new grandchild, dog, parakeet, son, daughter, ex-husband, spring plantings, winter rye, the fruit setting up in your garden, how busy you're going to be canning this season, the type of organic fertilizer you use, the bald patches in your grass, the latch on your gate that needs fixing, the wonderful supper you cooked up last week, the fish you caught, the awesome cloud formations you saw last week, or what they talked about on Oprah yesterday. It's not just you. It's you, and every single other volunteer that stops by and wants to talk about these things.

4) I especially don't want to hear about your restful week. I gave up summers off to be here.

5) When if I'm on the phone, don't hover in my doorway where you can hear the conversation, waiting for me to finish. Also, I'm "working hard." I'm not "hardly working," so LMTFA. Moreover, it's cold enough for me, it's hot enough for me, it's windy enough for me, and yes, I'm thankful that it's Friday.

6) Sometimes, you can just have thoughts in your head that don't need to be expressed out loud. Trust me.

7) Quit hogging the bathroom. What the hell are you doing in there for so long?

That's it. Thanks for letting me rant.

...

Things that may, or may not, be related to my thyroid

1) I woke up this morning and was instantly wide-awake, like I used to be. I also felt unfailingly optimistic, like I used to, instead of like something terrible was about to happen. For a few months now I've gradually felt worse and worse when I woke up. Not today, though. I feel gooooood. And I've stayed that way the whole day.

2) My voice seems a bit higher and softer today - that's something I did not expect. I stopped to say something to someone and they asked me to repeat myself twice. I cleared my throat, but there wasn't anything in it. I'm not horse, or stuffed up. Weird.

3) I feel thin. I can't really describe what I mean by that, other than I think I feel more energetic, or something, instead of like I'm lumbering around making the earth shake with each step. Didja ever have that feeling? Sometimes I just wake up feeling like I'm creating a scene out of Jurassic Park.

Boom.

Boooom.

BOOOOOOOOOMMM!

4) That's about it. No change in hunger, or skin, or any other stuff.

Meanwhile....It's spring! SSSPPPPRRRRIIIIINNNNGGGGGG!

Yay. I'm busying trying to work up a commuting route from home to work. It's only 9 miles, but it goes through to pretty, em, interesting areas of the city. So, I'm trying to figure out a good route that avoids the areas where I'm likely to get SHOT. The first 7 miles are on a dedicated paved bike path. It's the last 2 that aren't.

On the other hand, I might just pick up my time trial speed a bit, who knows?

...

Things I just happen to know today.

1) My last kid is going to graduate from high school. On time. (Whew!)

2) Now that that I have a settled, peaceful life I get to sit back and spectate on the drama of my two older kids lives. I wonder if I was this entertaining to my parents. I'm not worried about them, just curious. It's like Tevo-ing a soap opera. What will happen today, I wonder. Will Sarah find out that Juan is not who she thinks he is?

3) I know that there are now two places where I never, ever, ever want to live. One is the southernmost desert southwest US, home of the Palo Verde beetle as well as wasps the size of hummingbirds that feed on Tarantulas, and are considered to be "one of the most painful insect stings in the world". THE WORLD. Did you read that? THE WORLD.

The other is Fargo, ND, where one can apparently watch small icebergs float by from the comfort of their 2nd floor. I typed "Fargo ND ice jam" into an image search engine and was introduced to a staggering array from many previous years. I lived through blizzards and The Great Flood of '93 in South Dakota, and as soon as my education was done, I was outta there.

To my way of thinking, this unpleasantness is of biblical proportions. All that's missing is the toads and locusts.

4) I don't miss teaching, but I sure miss those kids. I haven't ruled out the thought of returning to schools some day. I just don't want to do it as a teacher.

5) I know I'm recovering, training-wise. I did a 6-mile pavement run last week, and a 7-mile pavement run this week. This week I was faster, and felt better afterwards. My loosely-made plan is to extend this run by one mile each week, and to run it after work, acclimate to running when I'm tired and it's hot. necessary training for BSLT 70.3. My first "test" will be the Jay Benson Sprint Triathon on Mother's Day.

6) I feel better today. I woke up feeling refreshed for the first time in weeks. I figure this is either due to thyroid medication, the return to my old WW diet, or my run last night and the subsequent coma of sleep I attained. Or all three.

7) I know now that if I wear a low-cut shirt to charm people I'm presenting to, I should avoid eating anything that is crumbly.

8) I'm considering maybe doing some of my events for charity. I'm thinking NAMI. I mean, more good could come of it, other than just fitness and fun. What I don't know is how much of a hassel it is or how to get started.

If you've had experience just flat-out picking a charity and doing stuff on their behalf, email me. I'd like some pointers.

...

Higher-protein diet: FAIL

I've been trying this higher-protein diet for two months now, and it's not working for me. At first, for a couple or three weeks, it was fine, but then gradually, I started feeling more and more tired, very much like the personal experiences I've read. Really tired. Like, laying down on my office floor for 15 minutes twice a day tired. Like being too tired to exercise. And, my thyroid is not so off as to lay the blame on that. This latest feeling tired is really, really dramatic, and it's gotten really bad in the past month or so.

Whenever I have a client who comes in with complaints I always ask how long they've felt this way. Then I ask them about "exceptions".

• When do you not feel this way?
  
• What have you tried before that works?
  
• What do you do that makes you feel good?

Unfortunately it is a truth universal that I don't often take my own advice. It's easy to blame everything on a thyroid, but in truth, when I look back over my weight loss saga for the past 5 years, Baboo has helped me see that only one thing has worked consistently for me: the Weight Watcher's Point system. Thyroid or not, it works for me.

It's easy, I get to "earn" extra points by doing exercise, and every single time that I've been diligent about keeping those points (early 2005, and then again in early 2008), I've dropped about 2 dress sizes pretty quickly, hypothyroid or no, and had plenty of energy for workouts. Whenever I quit keeping the points, I'd gain a dress size or two.

Everything else I've done since then has not worked. So, I'm going back to the points system.

I looked at my diet for the past couple months, and I'm getting about nearly twice as many points a day as what has worked for me in the past. I've been retricting my carbs to make up for the extra protein that I'm supposed to get on it. Runners need more energy and carbs, not less. I was doing well on less protein in the past. I'm going back to my tried-and-true.

Of course, I am too cheap to re-join WW them and pay the dues. I have a copy of their points calculation formula in a spreadsheet, so I'm going to track all my food in SparkPeople, which is free (the formula for Excel is: =(B1/50)+(C1/12)-(D1/5) where you would input in cell B1 your calories, c1 your fat, and d1 your fiber.) See, boys and girls? There is a use for Algebra after high school.

Sounds like a lot of work. But I am so terrible at just "guessing" how much I've eaten. I have to track it. Everyone has their own thing that works for them, and clearly, this is mine. I have to take responsibility for myself instead of looking for ways out. Do I think the Synthroid will work for me? yes. But more importantly, I've had my own personal experience with a lower carb, higher-protein diet, and it's not for me.

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