I’m waiting for a Bloggie, personally
I received an award from “Awarding the Web.”
I will post more when I can stop laughing.
It may be a while.
Sea Change
It is amazing what a weekend of MASH can do. Well, a weekend of MASH and a dozen other changes in circumstances, both major and minor.
My patience came skulking back Sunday evening, accompanied by my sanity.
I feel like I can breathe again.
Expect the blog to be quiet for a week or two. The horses I am helping with switched barns and there won’t be much to report while everyone is settling into a new routine.
My head may have exploded
This is how my week began: I was determined to accomplish two things at work on Monday. It’s Friday. They are still undone.
Tuesday, my head exploded. Wednesday morning, I went looking for the pieces, hoping to pull myself back together. The pieces were not in the freezer. Also not in the freezer: the bin for the automatic ice cube maker. I found that out when I opened the freezer door and non-contained ice came pouring out.
By Thursday, I was only pretending to have patience, since my actual patience had clearly run away. The police apparently do not take Missing Patience reports and are not willing to help me look for it.
And today—today on the way home from work I bought some food that is emphatically not allowed anymore. You may want to spare some kind thoughts from my neighbors. I can hear their TV, so I assume they can hear mine, and I intend to watch hours and hours and hours of MASH tonight. I hope they like the theme song.
I hope this marathon will help me regain my humanity. I’m sure my neighbors hope so too, even if they don’t know it yet.
I wonder if I put the ice cube bin back in the freezer. With the way this week has gone, that’s not a given…
P & P
Today’s lesson: a taste of piaffe and passage.
And by “a taste,” I mean “two or three steps at a time.” Of passage. The horse took my application for piaffe, considered it, and rejected it.
Which is all fine. The moments where he considered piaffe, and the few steps of passage that we got, were awesome.
Also awesome: the collected trot going into the piaffe and passage attempts, and the trot coming out, which was big, bold, beautiful.
Now to make sure I am doing lots and lots of my super secret ab-killer crunches at the gym, because I have found a whole new reason to
develop a core.
Weight for it…
Around a year ago, give or take a month, I decided I really should stop saying I was going to lose weight and actually, you know, do something about it. Otherwise, I was going to have to go out and buy pants in a size I swore I would never wear.
I sat down and acknowledged some truths, like “I hate change,” “Sugar makes me happy,” “I’m lazy,” and “Cutting carbs out of my diet just might make me homicidal.”
This raised some interesting questions, like: if my own inertia is going to make developing a real exercise program difficult, and cutting sugar and carbs from my diet is going to make me even more unhappy and unwilling to stick with a new program, how the hell am I going to lose weight?
The answer was to change one thing at a time, so that I was only vastly unhappy about one particular aspect of my life at any given moment.
And, periodically, I decided I was awesome and threw the whole program into the trash for a week or two and had some milkshakes.
This has worked, it really has.
Total weight lost in one year: 35-40 pounds.
For the past six weeks, I’ve been celebrating my awesomeness. While I haven’t gained, I haven’t lost more—and my overall fitness has decreased.
I decided I would have to do something before I started gaining again. There’s a gym on the way to work. I hate exercising, and I hate mornings, so I might as well exercise in the morning and hate everything all at once.
It’ll build character. The fact that this is the exact opposite of last year’s plan is not lost on me. This would never have worked at this time last year, but I think it will work now; I know that I can and will stick to a routine once I get into it, and that I can and will get through the hellish adjustment period.
So today I stopped at the gym to sign up.
As I chatted with the membership guy, we did the usual goals and such things. I explained about the last year, and he said that was great and asked how I did it.
I had to think for a moment, because the obvious answer is: eat less, exercise more. I thought it might be a trick question. Are there other weight-loss techniques? Has someone invented an eat more, exercise less program? Turns out they haven’t. Bummer.
We got all the details sorted out and I handed over my driver’s license. He looked at it, looked at me, and said “Is that really you? You really did lose a lot of weight!”
Well, no. I got someone fatter than me to take my DMV photo, because if there’s one thing any of us needs, it’s to increase the inherent awfulness of DMV photos.
And I’m somewhat bemused by the implied “I didn’t believe you before” in his statement, but I can’t fault him there. I’m sure a lot of people go on about the weight they (never actually) lost or are (not really) going to lose. It’s probably like horse people listening to the average person on the street saying “I’m a great rider!” and we’re thinking “a pony ride when you were six does not make you an Olympian.”
But I do like being flattered, even when the flattery is probably just part of a pitch to make sure I hang around long enough to sign on dotted line.
I signed. Tomorrow they are doing the orientation session. They promised to kick my ass in a whirlwind tour of all the equipment.
If you hear groaning tomorrow night, it’s probably my ass, wondering what it ever did to deserve the end of this prolonged celebration and the rather cruel resumption of… THAT word.
So far, my body hasn’t quite caught up with my brain and realized that I’m serious about the exercise-in-the-morning thing. When that happens, I’m sure you’ll hear the screams of protest.
I’m warning you, so you can go out and buy wax to stuff in the ears of any small children whose psyches might be permanently damaged by the choice phrases I am likely to resort to. I can’t be held liable for my language under the influence of exercise in the morning.