Dear Internet,
The recent spat of sporadic rains have not helped with the 93% humidity and high 80s temps. TheHusband and I cracked and turned the central air on Friday, which has been fabulous, but the minute we head out, we melt. Yesterday TheHusband went out to stake our poor tomato plants and I was hauling recyclables out to their respective cannister when I got tagged by some sun. That burned. It was painful. I quickly tossed the recyclables into their cannister and booked it back inside, vowing to never let the Daystar graze upon my body again.
TheHusband, who had the beginnings of heat stroke on Saturday night, was outside for roughly 20 -30 minutes and was nauseous when he got back indoors. Sleeping last night was painful for both of us: His back, including his shoulders and his upper arms, are burnt while the top of my thighs, chest, and arms were burnt. I could sleep on my back, but couldn’t sleep on my side or stomach. He could sleep on his stomach, but not on his back or sides.
We’ve been drinking lots of water, rubbing ourselves down with aloe, and eating ibuprofen to help with the pain. And this is why we never leave the house! Too traumatic! Meyer May House Distance: 1.17 miles Walk time: 20:38 minutes Pace: 16:70/mile
This morning’s walk took me past Meyer May House, which is spitting distance from our house. It has a cousin a few blocks in the opposite direction that was completed by some of Wright’s acolytes.
In the 3.5 years we’ve lived in this neighborhood, we’ve never done a tour of the house.
The rest of my walk was kind of a clusterfuck. The Walkmeter app froze and only recorded half of my walk, so my times above are estimates based on previous walks. My podcast app also froze, as well as the Spotify app, so the last half of my walk was music less. I was getting overly distracted by all of the world around me, I need the music to keep me focused. Music keeps my brain from overheating from the ping ponging of thoughts and ideas, which is super important when I am exercising or doing an activity that requires physicality or else OOOHHH SHINY.
And of course when I got home, everything started working again perfectly. Of course.
xoxo,
Lisa
Dear Internet,
Today is my last day at MPOW and this morning instead of doing my new usual morning mile, I lolled in bed slapping the snooze button until I had to get up.
It would be irony to be late on the my last day of work.
Truth be told, it was not overt laziness that prevented me from getting up but downright sleepiness and exhaustion. Starting with Sunday night, this week has been torture for sleep. I could not sleep until 6AM Monday morning and then ended up sleeping for four hours which threw Monday off like woah. Monday night we gutted like pigs in a trough over pizza and I took a Benadryl hoping it would knock me out early so I could actually get some sleep.
That failed as four hours later I took a Klonopin to finally knock me out.
Despite the drugs, Monday’s night’s rest was short which coupled with getting up early on Tuesday to walk, and the same pattern repeating itself on Tuesday meant I was averaging about 4-5 hours of sleep each night.
After dinner on Wednesday, I decided to put my feet up and do some web work with Orphan Black on in the background. TheHusband was off playing a video game, so he was relaxing on his own. I was feeling fairly peaceful as I worked until I got hit with rapid heart beat, which is my usual physical manifestation of anxiety.
A panic attack while watching Orphan Black? Really? Fuck this.
So obviously I took a Klonopin.
Hearts and guts are treacherous souls.
An absolute known, for me, on taking Klonopin on consecutive days is that I feel sluggish and even more tired the more I take it, even though the shelf-life is not long. Klonopin is great when I need to put a rampaging panic attack in its place, but it can never be more than that thought on occasion it has been.
So you will forgive me, I hope, that today’s walk was not done. After all, tomorrow is another day.
xoxo,
Lisa
Dear Internet,
6AM is far prettier in the spring (and summer), which makes it a lot easier to get motivated to get up and do stuff. I keep reminding myself how frustrated I was with the inability to do anything buried under 120″ of snow. Going outside was not an option. Exercising outside was a death wish.
Knowing how short spring was, and perhaps summer might be too, I’m trying to embrace this weather for all its worth, even if the 98% humidity means my hair looks like a bad ’80s perm, I’ll take it.
So here I am, up at 6AM and out the door around 6:20. My walk this morning was not routed and I figured that I would wing it as long as I got in at least a mile, which turned out to be in my favor because I stumbled across a steam punk pig in a tree. Steam punk pig in a tree. Distance: 1.22 miles Walk time: 20:38 minutes Pace: 16:70/mile
After making and consuming my smoothie, I headed upstairs to get ready for work. TheHusband’s voice boomed from under his blanket and pillow fort the WHIR of the blender frightened him so much in his dead sleep, he woke thinking angry robots were attacking.
xoxo,
Lisa
P.S. I’m still not coordinated enough yet to pause the pedometer, take a few pictures, and then get going again, hence why some images may look a tad out of focus. Or I could just argue – ART!
Dear Internet,
Last night we straight up went Bacchian on the forbidden deliciousness of pizza that we had delivered. As I was predictably feeling terrible this morning when I woke up at around 6AM, I decided there was no point to me laying wide awake in bed staring at the ceiling and I should get up and go do something.
That go do something turned into a brisk walk around my neighborhood.1
As I start to sort my daily schedule, one thing I wanted to make sure to happen, regardless of weather, was that I got up and walked a mile each day around my neighborhood.2 One, it would give me some exercise. Two, it would get me out of the house. Three, I could use this to loosely train for a competitive 5K walk. Four, it would help with the water retention happening in my ankle. Five, exercise helps with the crazy.
So really, there is no reason why I shouldn’t be doing this even if i it is the only thing I’m doing.
As I was walking this morning in the light drizzel, I thought it would be a great idea to get a picture of something that strikes my fancy that I see on my walk and post it as well as my distance and times. This will serve no purpose to really anyone but me, but what the fuck. Let’s see how much I can do this. Distance: 1.32 miles Walk time: 23:32 minutes Pace: 16:56/mile
For a fat girl with sketchy ankles, I sure do walk fast. And this is my normal speed.
After I came home, I woke TheHusband up show me for the fourth time how to make a smoothie so I can do it on my own. Turned out much easier than I thought and despite the fact it looks like green slime, it is actually quite delicious. Throbbing Manor Smoothie (base)
8oz orange juice
2 leaves + steams of a major green (I used chard this morning)
1 heaping tsp of hemp protein
1 heaping tsp of chia seeds
1 1/2 cups of frozen fruit (we are currently using mixed fruit)
Add ingredients into blender of your choice in the order above, making sure at the very least the juice is added first. Blend until thoroughly liquid and then pour into a glass and serve. Makes about 16oz of smoothie.
Variations: If OJ is not on hand, use about a cup or so of ice and swap out the frozen fruit for fresh. The recipe is flexible enough that you really just need liquid + green + fruit to get you going with protein powders added for extra nutrition.
xoxo,
Lisa
P.S. If I feel a bit — forced on excitement on this whole thing, I have found the more I fake being excited about something I dread, then discovering it is not akin to torture, I tend to be more open to continuing said thing. Rainbow sparkles unicorn poop for all.
1. It took me longer to find my earbuds, sort out music/podcast options, sync everything together, change, put shoes on then it did to do the actual walk. Next time should be a lot faster getting ready.
2. I use the web version of Gmaps Pedometer/Miler Meter to map routes and then sync it with the iOS version and then use Walkmeter to track time/distance/pace. While both are free, I upgraded both to get the extra features. Since it’s cumbersome to use both, and MilerMeter has a shitty interface on iOS, I hope to get intimate with Walkmeter to use it’s full potential.
Persephone and Hades, circa 450BCE via British Museum
Dear Internet,
Where was I? Oh! Yes.
It is late Sunday night and TheHusband is engrossed in some sport ball of DOOM that is nail biting, etc. I’m annoyed because I have my British telly lined up for the evening and I was told nothing was going to happen just yet so I can’t watch my stories as hoped.
But if my yawning is any indication, and how sleepy my eyes feel, when I get into bed to watch said telly, I’ll promptly fall asleep.
This week has been a week. I still feel okay with missing a few days writing this week, sometimes things just cannot be helped. This upcoming week is going to be far worse as due to schedule kerfuffles, I’ve got at least two 12 hour days on tap, plus I’m prepping for one of my liaison departments accreditation which is taking longer than anticipated. I’ve got a lot of plates I’m spinning in the air at the moment and some personal projects are going to have to be on hold for just another week. I know I said a few weeks that I would be catching up on personal email and projects, but please bear with me for another week if you haven’t heard from me yet.
The next morning.
True to my earlier prediction, we were not five minutes into telly where I promptly fell asleep. We forewent going to the gym this morning as TheHusband has not been feeling well, some version of the plague has been hanging out for the last week, which worked to my benefit since it meant we did not go to the gym. The next three days are going to be rough as I’m working longer than usual shifts to cover all the meetings and classes that were heaped up by happenstance.
Other notes:
I discovered sometime in the night that my heating blanket is not in fact broken as I was beginning to think it was. It seems if the dog is laying on it , it stops the heat from generating up to me. Once I moved her off, and noticing the location she was laying on felt like a sauna, the rest of the blanket warmed up. New note to self: Do not allow dog to lay at my feet anymore.
Speaking of the dog, we go in for a vet check up on Wednesday to see about upping her dose of Prednisone for her arthritis and spaghetti legs, but not to be too much of a Cassandra, the end is coming. Example: she has almost no feeling in her back legs or below her waist anymore, so she has not been able to tell us when she needs to poop. It just comes out and she’s surprised as we are when it happens. This morning I was carrying her down the stairs and stopped in the kitchen to get some coffee before taking her out. She starts pooping while I’m holding her like a football and I had to put her on the ground, holding her up by her harness, so she can finish her business. She’s had a good run at 13.5 years, but coupled with the occasional peeing when she sleeps which has started to become near daily and the fact she cannot feel when she has to poop, we said if it gets to this point where her quality of life is diminishing, and it will get worse, keeping her around to soothe my savage heart is not in good interest to anyone. Discussions will be had with the vet, and potentially hard choices will be made.
The exercise calendar I mentioned a few weeks ago? I’m using it to track our time at the gym. I’ve cemented that I work best when I hit the gym early in the morning before my day gets going, finding that any time I attempt to schedule after work or afternoons during off days just doesn’t work. To keep myself honest, I’m checking in to the gym on Foursquare and then writing out what we did on the calendar, which is currently posted below my Naked Rowers calendar in my home office. I have been continuously wearing my FitBit Flex since I got it for my birthday last summer, and I like seeing the numbers grow.
Speaking of FitBit, they sent me my yearly roundup:
Not too shabby for six months! If I can keep up the gym and once the weather gets better this year, do more walking/running then next year should at least be double, if not triple that value. I do wish the notification when my battery is low was more reliable. I have set to email and text me but it never seems to sync up with the actual battery level.
Our holiday tree is still up. I had made self-promise to take it down this past weekend but that looks like it is not happening anytime soon.
I’m now ending my third week of being caffeine free and I think I’ve found a winner. My moods have been regulating themselves fairly well the longer I go without, which was the point of the experiment. I’m sure the exercising I’m doing is also of help to keep me fairly mood balanced. In the next month or so, I’m going to continue on with the experiment and remove refined sugars from my diet and see how that works.
xoxo,
Lisa
Ophanim, 13thC via Bavarian State Library
Dear Internet,
It’s late in the evening, ticking towards midnight [now significantly past midnight, thanks mania!], and we’ve been sloths all day. Not too surprising, with the current weather we’ve been having, leaving the house would be borderline stupidity. To be fair, TheHusband and I were at the gym on Saturday, coupled with an hour spent shoveling this morning from the first part of the snows, we feel like we’ve got our exercise in for the weekend. But also to be fair, my own silliness for not taking any kind of drug before gym tripped my arthritis up and while the pain has been moderate, it’s still annoying and it has meant I’ve been spending a lot of time with my leg up rather than being active.
Monday has been called a snow day across the midwest as the snows have started to come down, including MPOW, which makes me slightly sad as I’m naturally off so I can’t claim a snow day in jubilation. My nearly four week holiday comes to an end on Wednesday and I’m both slightly delighted and slightly not. I watched a lot of telly, read a few books, wrote a lot here, and did a lot of research for my book. My MIL was in town for a week, we stayed in on New Years, my dragon tattoo fill started, and I wore a lot of sports bras. Not a bad staycation overall.
But.
I need structure. If there is anything this vacation has finally drilled in my head, I thrive in structure. When we were getting up in the mornings early, setting our rhythms for the day, I found I was more productive than when left to my own devices. As much as my inner bad girl grits her teeth while admitting this, sometimes chaos is not always the best answer.
Monday, I will start prepping to get back into work mode. My brain has been in hibernation for the last month, so it’s time to take off the sports bras, yoga pants, loose t-shirts and get things back in order. To get this in the right frame of mind, I cleaned out my personal inbox today so if you are wondering where the email I owe you is, you should get it in the next day or so. If we talked about doing projects together, I’ll start getting in the groove for those as well. Monday, I’m also planning on sorting mail, finishing up bills, and maybe taking down the Christmas tree.
While we were absolute sloths during our staycation, we did join the local Y the day after Christmas (via online of course). As it turns out my brother and his girlfriend, my tattoo artist and his wife, my friend Liz and her husband also joined within the same week. It’s time to walk, yoga, and swim. Saturday, during the break of the snows, TheHusband and I scrimmaged playing basketball, where I was not as bad as I thought. We kept getting run over by little kids playing soccer, all wearing European team gear, with one of their parents yelling drill instructions in Italian, which were often punctured by our “goddammits” when we missed shots.
I played basketball all through primary school (but not secondary) and some of the old drills came back to my hands as if I was 12 all over again, not nearly 42. I hate watching the game, but apparently I can get into playing it without a second thought. I give no fucks about NBA, March Madness, or Top 10 or anything basketball related.
In the guilt department, the damned post about being fit has been sitting in my drafts folder since December 2012. I am promising myself this is not going to be another year in which it gathers dust, but talking about being crazy is far easier than talking about being fat because you can’t judge crazy by looks alone.
Speaking of crazy, I’ve been caffeine free since January 1. I have been reading some personal anecdotes as well as studies about the effect of caffeine on bipolar and decided to create a one person sample study – me. On one (and many) of my drugs I was on in 2013 for my ADHD, caffeine was off the table since it amped up the effects of the drugs, which are stimulants, for me. Again, a lovely side effect that affected no one else I knew had. I know many ADHD sufferers who self-medicate with caffeine sans the drugs, but I was finding that maybe that is not working for me since caffeine feeds into my mania. I was already cutting caffeine out of my diet after 12PM, and had been for ages, coupled with my caffeine free existence in 2013 for a bit, maybe it was worth a go to see what would happen.
Not surprisingly, I have felt a lot more stable in the last few days then I had in the last month, and my brain has been less foggy. My ADHD has been getting symptomatic. Crazy or unfocused — oh how shall I ever choose?
It’s now significantly past the witching hour and I need to get to bed. Or pretend to. Or something.
[The internal network went down while I was writing this so I missed my midnight deadline, so I’m backtracking this to 23:59.]
x0x0,
Lisa
Recently it’s been discovered I have what is politely termed as “adult onset allergies,”1 which decided today to go into full force, which means any work I planned on doing today has gotten pushed aside in the “itcy/watery eyes, headachey feeling shoot me WHINE” makes it difficult to concentrate for tasks for too long. HOWEVER! I wanted to get get some updates about posts-in-drafts that were to have been published about some upcoming projects I’m working on.
In no particular order:
Alice and I have decided to learn a new (dead) language, specifically Anglo-Saxon (Olde English) 2. Details forthcoming (post is currently in draft status), but we’ll be updating Dead Language Society and I’ll be x-posting my entries here.
Kristin and I have a poster accepted to Michigan Library Association annual conference, taking place in November 2010. Our poster presentation is, Critical Error: The need for Michigan libraries to represent themselves online and it’s the beginnings of a (predicted to be) long-term research project. We’re pretty excited about this and will be posting a lot of our stuff (findings, research interests, etc) over at our joint blog, Librarianation. I will more than likely be x-posting library stuff between the two blogs.
The next installment of So, You Want to be a Librarian/Archivist? is also in draft status, with the subject matter of being proactive within the field of librarianship/archives. I’ve gotten prods from various people around the internets that I need to keep this series going.
Other updates: Job hunt: Still unemployed and still interviewing but nothing concrete as of yet. To keep ourselves sane, we house hunt via Zillow in areas that I’m interviewing in as well as areas we’re interested in moving to. I’ve been collecting the links of the homes in these areas we’re interested in on my Delicious feed. Walk, Don’t Run: Justin and I have been power walking nearly every day our neighborhood for the last two weeks, with the idea that next week we’ll start a “couch to 5k” like program next week. I’m not keen on this idea for numerous reasons, mainly that running feels more invasive to my arthritis than walking. I’m told this is bullarky, but I can only report what my bones feel. Our diet is going more or less okay, but we’re always looking to improve it. And last, but not least, Wednesday the Pug has had her bi-weekly bath. That is ALWAYS important to include.
1. Not sure what I’m allergic TO yet, but it was pointed out to me all of my health issues seemingly came into being after recently getting married.
2. Yes, Olde English is purposely misspelled.
Roma tomato, fresh moz on spelt farl.
Last night I was busy making farls and finishing up a hat I was knitting, all while whilst wearing an apron.
The prior night, it was me prancing around the kitchen making homemade granola and hummus. While wearing an apron. And nearly every night it has been the same image: Me in the kitchen brewing up some witchy potion while wearing an apron.
I’ll let that image settle for a bit because if you know me and the above image seems fucking ridiculous to you because Lisa without coffee, cigarettes, and some processed food living in the fridge, you would typically be correct. I’ve run into the bathroom numerous times in the last few days to make sure my ears didn’t suddenly sprout pearl earrings and my tattoos were still in place. My hair was still twisted up in Lisa-poofs and my piercings were all present. I am slowly turning into Martha Stewart’s bastard punk rock daughter.
But to be fair, this isn’t a new development – it’s been going on for quite some time. Granola made with oats, apricots, banana chips, almond slivers, raisins, cashews and dates.
In the fall of 2006, I was having problems with digesting food – meaning that regardless of what I was eating, hardly anything was coming back out (to put it politely). For example, I was physically ill in the sense that eating pizza really heavy on the sauce meant I was up later in the night throwing up or having rot gut. If the pizza was light sauce, I had terrible heart burn. I used to have a cast iron stomach! Why was this happening? In the late summer of 2006, after numerous days of no bowel movement, I took myself over to the ER to find out what the hell was going on. They couldn’t find anything wrong with me, gave me a extra strong laxative and recommended a local nutritionist who diagnosed that I had some sensitivity to nearly 100 different types of food.
In the last four years, I’ve alternated between being really good and being really bad with my food. That whole discussion is worthy of several blog posts in themselves, but it’s been awful for the last few months after we came back from our honeymoon. Not only have I been randomly sick (again) but the weight is not coming off, rather, it’s packing back on. Justin was also gaining weight and feeling overall of crap. Deserts from Pronto! and Astoria tastes FANTASTIC going down, but later? Not so much. In fact, most restaurant/processed food gives me issues in some form or another, not always immediate it eventually does happen. Based upon Justin’s prior experience when he was training for half-marathons and my food issues, we decided to implement the following as of last week:
No sugar (including raw, brown, white, and fake sugars). Honey/Stevia/Agave/etc are allowed.
As little gluten as possible.
No foods listing HFC as an ingredient.
No pasta, no store bought bread.
Little to no meat.
Heavy on fruits, nuts, whole grains, veggies, cheeses.
If I want to eat something, I have to find a lisa-happy version. Bread, for instance, has been replaced with Spelt farls which I can tolerate amazingly well.
I’ve been taking photos all week of the food we’ve been eating and uploading them to Flickr. And nearly every single thing we’ve had to eat this week has been made from scratch, with fresh goods (organic if available) with my own little hands. While what we’re eating is pretty simple, it’s amazing how much of our appetites have dropped since we’re not eating (as much) crap as we used to. We’ve also started doing mat Pilates every morning for 30 minutes into our daily routine. While we don’t think of this as weight loss or diet gimmick, but as a 180 lifestyle change, we’re still keeping track of our weight, making adjustments as needed.
The first week weigh-in, I lost 7.5lbs while Justin lost nearly 3. Where as it was pretty common for me to have some kind of “issue,” ranging in varying degrees of bloating/nausea/heartburn, this is the first week in a long time I haven’t had that. And I’m not terribly concerned about the huge weight loss either, because it’ll adjust itself in the next week or two.
It’s not so awful to be Martha Stewart’s punk rock daughter – as long as the only pearl necklaces are the ones given to me by my husband1, I’ll think I’ll be just fine.
1. I don’t have to explain this one to you, do I?
I got on the scale this morning and when I saw how much weight I was gaining back, I decided enough was enough.
Back in late April, a friend of mine and I went to Weight Watchers and where I had lost 20 lbs in nearly two months. I had kept the weight off for the most part of the summer and while I was gone to MIchigan for five weeks — and still kept it off up to about a month ago. The 20 lbs was just a drop in the bucket to the grand total, but I’ve noticed that my weight has slowly been creeping up again and I thought to myself “Self, time to take WW seriously again”.
Lately I’ve been feeling overrun with items mainly because of school and work. My mothers situation hasn’t been helping in the slightest and I’ve also been feeling the pressure to start too many effing projects only to not finish them. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now and I’m letting the stress lead me to eat food and not think about what it’s doing to my body.
Plus my jeans are getting tight again and the irony of that is that I bought one size larger than I normally bought in the first place because finding jeans are so hard to fit. I know (and I’ve said this a million times before) that I’ll never be stick thin — and that’s fine. I like having a little bit of wiggle to my body but I want to not have so much wiggle to knock out a third world country.
heh.
So with that being said, I’m going to be working on ‘challenge’ with a few friends of mine within the next few weeks. Nanowrimo starts on Thursday and so I know for the month of November I’m going to be pretty effing busy.
I’m not awake yet.
x0x0x
Lisa
Tonight was supposed to be my first night at dance class, but, work pressure was mounting up today and i got an awful migraine around 4pm that just wouldn’t leave. I called Alisha and told her that I would have to take a rain check till next monday — it wasn’t that I was going to not follow through, fuck, i spent some cash on my shoes (tap and ballet), but for some reason some of the signs of my anxiety flared up (why I dunno, I’ve been taking the drugs), and i thought it was best to go home.
I’m taking a combination of tap/jazz and ballet which is to provide two things a: get me limber and flexible, b: get me in shape and c: so I can dance on the dance floor. I don’t know why lately I’ve been on this club kick even though I haven’t been to a club since, hell, when I left grand rapids four year nearly five years ago, but I have been. I just love dancing. I proudly told Alisha (who is a professional dancer) that I danced from the time I was 3 till I was 9 or 10 or 11 (somewhere in there) where the dreams of a professional dancer sort of got shot with my growth spurt and my big feet (I wore a size 10 shoe starting when I was in fourth grade and I stood over 5′ tall — this has got to tell you something).
