What's Up, Doc?

 A super-quick recap - in the fall of 2014, a routine mammogram turned up some "iffy" areas. Several more tests and three biopsies later, I spent Christmas of 2014 in the talented hands of skilled surgeons and then in a medically-indicated tube top to hold everything together. (Painkillers and the holidays. It ought to be a country song.) The first part of 2015 was spent having post-surgical radiation and the resulting fatigue kept me pretty much sidelined. 2016 was all about getting back to a "new normal," and now we're here.

I just had my most recent check-up and the report is a good one. My scars are barely noticeable, I don't have pain (although fatigue is still an occasional issue) and they've decided to scale back my check ups to every six months, rather than every three. This is awesome news, indeed! Oh, I'm still dealing with side effects from Tamoxifen, a drug I'm on for another three-plus years and we talked about some methods to handle that. Uptown Yoga Loft will be seeing me, as both yoga and acupuncture have been prescribed to me. (In fact, I just left this post to make my first acupuncture appointment - cross your fingers for me on Wednesday the 18th!)

However, there is one area that simply has to be addressed. While my doctor did not lecture me, nor did she wag her finger in my face, well - sigh. Overall weight and fitness must be tended to, thyroid notwithstanding. I'm surprisingly okay with that. I'm doing well with my dedication to self-care (I really do encourage you to jump into the 31-Day Self Love Writing Challenge), and I promise to not do anything totally stupid like eat only cabbage soup for three straight weeks.

But I won't kid you, either. I want fast results and I know that doesn't work. So it's slow plodding for me. Cut out the junk food (bye, Goobers!), more water every day, and yes - even in the gray of winter, it's time to exercise. I have to remember that losing a couple of pounds a month is perfectly fine. This is going to be hard. Very, very hard. I think this will go better with a goal in mind, so here goes - by the end of 2017, I will complete a 10K. I might walk a big ol' chunk of it, but the Dancing Sloth is on the comeback trail!

Hi, Ho, Here We Go!

New Year's Lights!

As I said on Christmas Eve, I'm bypassing most of the resolution aspect of the New Year. Instead, I've chosen one overarching goal for this trip around the sun - I want to be kind and find delight in my days. Not only do I think it's a worthy aim, I'm pretty sure it's a tall enough order to suffice for the entire year. But hey - I've already started!

I've seen this a number of times in my life - once I commit to a certain course of action, odd things begin to happen. I run into someone at the coffee shop who has some piece of information I need, or a student mentions something that triggers a cascade of thoughts, a chance comment overheard in the lobby of the movie theater ultimately leads to a brainstorm that boosts me over a creative dry spell, or someone here in Cyber-Land posts a link that directs me to exactly what I didn't know I needed. What I'm fumbling here to say is that there's much to be said for committing to an outcome and then being open to what the Universe is trying to give you.

In my case, just after Christmas, a friend sent me a link to a very interesting experiment. The idea is that each day for one month, I'll receive an e-mail writing prompt and that I'm supposed to set aside a few minutes each day to thoughtfully answer the prompt. I can share my responses or keep them private, as I wish. This particular one-month writing is all about self-care and breaking the hold negative thoughts have on my headspace and, five days in, I can report that it's incredibly refreshing! It's a wonderful, supportive community and, if you think you could benefit from it, please use this link to check them out! Start whenever you want and skip prompts that don't "work" for you. This is, I think, one of the most important lessons to take from the activity - it doesn't have to be perfect.

I know her all too well . . .

On that note, I'm also working on a simplified "bullet journal" to keep track of actions that I hope will lead to concrete habits. I've been keeping a brief journal since September, but only this week have I adopted more of a bullet journal style. Some of these bullet journals that I've seen (especially on Pinterest, which is both great and greatly to be feared) are magnificent, but they can also be intimidating. While I want to take a few minutes every night to reflect and play with colored pencils, I know that I can all too easily fall into the "perfectionist trap," so I can't compare mine to anybody else's. I will admit that I really enjoy doodling a little picture to go with each day. I don't draw particularly well, but it's relaxing to just moodle around with things without it having to be perfect.

Last bit for this post - one of my "actions that I hope will become a habit" is really making a conscious effort every single day to treat myself better. In order to do this, and knowing that I have to be accountable to the journal at the end of the day, I'm constantly on the lookout for ways to bring little luxuries into my everyday life. Yesterday, for example, I made a real effort to dress up for work - jaunty scarf, high heels (with super-comfortable slippers under the desk!), a discreet puff of my "good" perfume, red lipstick - very French. You get the idea. And I certainly had a sense of confidence that day due to my experiment in "dressing up." Then today, I definitely dressed down, since I had to take Spooky to the vet, then go to work, a schedule that certainly dictated some of my wardrobe decisions! After work, I needed to run an errand to the Clinique counter (look, FryDaddy doesn't stay that pretty without some effort!) and I took the time to have a consult with the clerk about my foundation. Together, we tried a couple of different ones and I left with a free ten-day sample. Felt like a duchess in sweatpants at that point, which is not a bad thing at all!

So that's what's up with me these days. How about you? Are you making time for yourself? Saying nice things to yourself? Tell me about it!

Of Endings and Beginnings

It's been longer than I meant for it to be since my last post, but the last six weeks have been full of revelations, epiphanies, planning, and unexpected good-byes, so correspondence slipped to the bottom of my list. (Along with housework, but that's another tale for another time, yes?)

I won't try to sum it all up. Instead, just let me say this - sometimes you have to go away and spend time with people who care very deeply for you and who know you well enough to allow you to just be so that some wisdom can seep in the cracked places. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the new information I have gained and I'm trying to be more intentional in my living. Hence, I'm starting to play with a simple "bullet journal." It's very easy for someone like me to get overwhelmed at all the "ooh, way cool!" versions out there (see the picture at the top of the post, for instance), so I'm trying to remind myself to keep things simple. As a costume designer once told me when I asked about a tan splash on one of her intricate renderings, "It's coffee. This is a tool to be used; it's not art." We'll have to see where this goes, but I'm looking forward to taking a few minutes at the beginning and end of each day to reflect and ground myself. It's far too easy to mistake work for Work, you know.

Further, in the time since my last post, I've attended two funerals and, although I was glad to see some not-often-seen friends, I've had quite enough of that sort of thing for a while. Death is, of course, a part of life, but it's a crummy, lousy, stink-like-three-day-old-fish part and I've had it up to HERE with it! While others may turn to the classical poets to attempt to make sense of the senseless, I am a simpler type and I think Jimmy Buffett said it as well as any of us:

Alone on a midnight passage
I can count the falling stars
While the southern cross and the satellites
They remind me of where we are
Spinning around in circles
Living it day to day
And still twenty four hours maybe sixty good years
It's really not that long a stay.

So let us be good to one another when we meet along the way.

Peace to you.

Checking In - September!

What an interesting month it's been! (Such a useful word, "Interesting.")I've had the opportunity to learn a lot about "over-goaling" this month and I'm actually spending a few days re-assessing. Far from being a sign of failure, I've learned this year that those times are crucial to success. I took on too many goals and put too much pressure on myself to excel at all of them all the time, and it's okay to acknowledge that and correct it. Forward motion is progress and sometimes that forward motion is pitching a fit and declaring that there's just no way that all of this can get done right now and, if fact, declaring Bill the Cat to be my spirit animal!! (Pant, pant, sigh, gasp.)

True.

But where's that leave me?

Well, the "good books" and "good movies" challenges are back-burnered right now. With work on the Babylon 5 book heating up already, I found myself overwhelmed and teary at the prospect of doing those things to mark a title off an arbitrary list. I'll get to them, but right now isn't the season for that. I've seen plenty of movies and read plenty of books, but not the ones on "the list" and that's just dandy.

Zone cleaning is sort of in the same boat - it's not a struggle to keep up with my morning and evening routines, but much of anything beyond that is proving to be monumental. I keep the book with the zones out and I read my daily challenge each day and sometimes it gets done and sometimes something else gets done. You know what? The house is still standing and remains in better order than it used to be.

The budgeting challenge hits full-force this month. As I wrote over Labor Day weekend, we had car repair bills that turned into "we can't resurrect her this time," which meant a certain amount of yike! We're mobile again and just fine, but those were not expenses were were prepared for. It's going to be a tough end of the year on that score, no doubt about it, but it'll all work out and hey - we're doing all of this so that soon (on the cosmic scale, anyway), money won't be the issue that it is now. Delayed gratification. Can't say as I like it too much.

Now to report of the 5K challenge, which I've folded into the first-stage-of-wrapping-up "You Gonna Finish That?" Challenge. This was designed to make me hard-core accountable for a number of habits, including diet, exercise, and self-care. (Remember what I said about too many goals?) I used SparkPeople as my diet and exercise tracker which I liked since it had exercise videos and recipes that linked directly to the tracker. I don't like tracking, although I'll admit it's useful to see patterns (I eat too many carbs, for example. Mostly "good" carbs, like whole grains and the carbs found in fruit, but still - that was eye-opening). I made sacrifices in terms of sweets, made sure to drink at least two liters of water per day (yep, I know where every bathroom is throughout my college campus), aimed for hard exercise at least three times a week, and have tried to get more sleep. 

Right at a month in, I can report that, while I still don't like tracking, knowing that I have to do it has made it easier to say "no" to some bad choices. While I'm trying to not give the scale too much authority (I still stink at that, by the way), I'm down four pounds. I've also logged 13 run/walk workouts this month for a total of 31-and-a-touch miles, with 22 of those miles being at a jobble or better. For someone who was staggering around a church parking lot seven months ago, that ain't too shabby! So I'm going to keep this challenge going another month and let's see what we see.

What I really want to add in now is more attention spent on taking better care of me - teaching is not a job that lends itself to being left at the office and researching and writing a book isn't exactly a side job, so my twin goals here are to (a) make the office more pleasant and (b) not be so hard on myself with deadlines that I set and that I know to be ridiculous. I had a small writing project that nearly drove me around the bend that I should have been able to handle with ease, but when added to the several other regular gigs I've got going on (which includes two blogs, a weekly movie show that involves watching and research before the cameras begin rolling, and a regular column over at the pop culture site BiffBamPop), I was perilously close to the non-whimsical version of "crazy." So I reached the conclusion that normal people would've gotten to a long time ago and I'm not taking on more work during this time. Let me keep working on spinning the plates I've already got up on sticks!

Onward!

Checking In - August!

It was just about a week ago that I checked in here regarding progress on the 2014 January resolutions, so I'll be brief on those:

Zone Cleaning Challenge - well, I've got my morning and evening routines down, but adding in the weekly zones is still hit & miss for me.  Now that the semester has started and is finding a routine of its own, this comes back to the forefront.
5K Challenge - who would have thought that I'd find out I actually enjoy jobbling? I have my first "real" (as in timed) 5K race this coming Saturday. I'm nervous, since of course I want to do well, but it's an excited kind of nervous. I'll be doing something that I couldn't have done when I first set these challenges and that has to be viewed as progress of the good kind.
"Good Book" Challenge - Just under the wire, I managed to finish Faulkner's Light in August before I ran out of month. I really, really enjoyed this and I found myself wondering what Faulkner's reaction to the events in Ferguson, MO would be if he were still around to talk with us about Southern mythology, class, and race - always race.
"Good Film" Challenge - Saw several good films this month; none were on my list. Well, it doesn't make me a bad person.
Budgeting Challenge - Doing well enough on this that we enjoyed a weekend away for Labor Day. That probably blew the budget (or perhaps the car repairs will - like Moses, our loyal Bonnie Bonneville didn't make it up the mountain to the Promised Land, but unlike Moses, her damage may be fleeting), but it was a sorely-needed trip and I regret nothing!

I think I "over-goaled" here trying to do everything at once, so I cut myself several breaks as I focused on one good habit at a time instead of trying to overhaul so many aspects of my life at once. But now that a few habits have, in fact, become habits, FryDaddy and I agreed it was time to tackle the elephant.

Eating.

See, I like food. I like white-tablecloth restaurants and I like fried chicken eaten on a tailgate. My comfort food is Southern - pimento cheese, Barefoot's homemade mac 'n' cheese, sweet tea, Krispy Kreme, and so on. I've been known to say (to a good friend, not on a job interview), "You gonna finish that?" while gesturing with my fork. I grew up one of those people who was picky enough of an eater that it seemed I could eat whatever I wanted with no problem. Well, like eight-tracks, those days are gone. Yes, I'm a runner, but I'm a baby runner, and I simply don't burn enough calories to eat like that.

Add to that the fact that my job involves a lot of sitting and typing, and the problem begins to emerge.

Add to that the fact that I deal with stress by eating and the problem comes into focus. 

Add to that the fact that I also do a movie show for local cable, and prep work for that involves sitting and researching the films and sitting in a dark theater to watch the films, which for me as a kid, meant treats like buttered popcorn and candy (maybe a Slushie), and I don't need a nutritionist to tell me what's what.

Oh, I've tried all this before; I've even bought the books and the hype. The result is the same - I'll lose five pounds, then reward myself with a Blizzard. So I've roped in FryDaddy this time to help me. Really, it's not a matter of me not knowing what a portion size is or not realizing that fried is less good for me than broiled, it's a matter of putting theory into practice.

I'm trying to be sensible - no cabbage soup, no "only eat tomatoes for three days," or any of that nonsense - and I know that this will take time, but dammit, I don't want it to. Sigh. Patience may be a virtue, but it's not one of my virtues!

Today has been all about getting ready - I'm eating a few things that will shortly be on the "verboten for now" list (Mickey D's really does have the best fries, you know) and I've done a massive grocery run. No kidding, this one's going to be hard, but for the next month, my plan is to limit my refined carbs (no rice or pasta as a side dish with dinner and no stuffed baked potatoes as dinner), no sweets beyond a touch of good dark chocolate or something similar (au revoir, Fuzzy Peach!), and (gulp!) no movie treats. Let them catch me sneaking in grapes and baby carrots. Let's see where I am in a month. I won't lie - the scale has power over me, but so does my wardrobe, and I'm tired of putting something on and offering up a muttered prayer that the button will fasten.

Deep breath. Here goes - and yes, I'm gonna finish that.

Checking In - July!

OK - time to check in.  As regular readers know, at the start of this year, I set five goals for myself, with the intention of making 2014 a true "makeover year" and I post these "check ins" once a month (generally on the very last day of the month or the very first day of the month) to both show how things are going and to keep myself accountable for these goals I set.  And make no mistake, these were some LARGE goals. The road hasn't always been smooth, but looking back, I can see progress, often in some unexpected ways. So - the goals were:

1. Believing that a sense of calm would come from a neater house, I wanted to get organized and stop doing "crisis cleaning" on the weekends. FlyLady had helped me get rid of (maybe literally) a ton of clutter, so I decided to take that system a little deeper and add "zone cleaning."
2. Money's tight, but I wanted to stop using credit cards and live frugally, with the idea of whittling away at the household debt.
3. I decided to watch 24 "good movies" that I really should have already seen, from a variety of genres, ranging from foreign classics to comedies.
4. I wanted to read six "good books" that had slipped by me.
5. I wanted to feel stronger, so I decided to train to participate in a 5K race this year. Thus, the "Dancing Sloth" was born.

Whew! Taken all at once, these goals were intimidating. But I've stuck to it (mostly) and can report the following as we head into the "dog days" of August:

July was interesting, since I was back in the classroom with my summer school classes. They're fun classes (at least I think so) and they went well, but boy howdy! do they take time. (I had two sections to teach, each of which met for three days a week for  just over three hours a session - yike!) Now that FryDaddy is home from graduate school for good, we're working through our "delayed honeymoon" period, which is an occasion for much YAY! but it also means we've been sorting through things that most couples would have sorted out at the beginning of the marriage. One thing I can thoroughly recommend for those in such situations (although I think this might be a good general rule) is to schedule "date time." We've been doing that, but we took it to a new level today and made all of today "date day" and it's been just lovely. We ran on our own schedules, ate out so no one had to cook or clean, saw a matinee (we chose Guardians of the Galaxy, which we loved, but pick whatever suits you), and took advantage of a rainy, unseasonably-cold day to lounge and snooze. It doesn't really matter what you do, it matters that you make time to do it together.

1. As to the housework routines, we're nearly there. I have a few things I do every morning and a few things in the evening to get things ready for the next day, pretty much without fail. I'm working to add just 15 minutes to that on the weekdays, usually just after I get home. I spend those few minutes in the "zone room" for that week, using the FlyLady "daily mission" and zone checklist for that day as a starting point. Hey - the living room windows got cleaned this week, which has to count for something!
2. We're back on the budget horse this month, making a strict budget using the Dave Ramsey system. (Yeah, he shoots his mouth off about the poor and makes some downright dumb statements, but his "debt snowball" system is sound. Take what works, leave the rest.) We'd used it before, but we were running off two budgets, since FryDaddy was at school and I was here. Now we're consolidated, which should make things easier. Fewer meals out, though - that's for sure!
3. The movie challenge -  I marked one off my list in July; the amazing classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. If you haven't seen this one - even if you're not a fan of Westerns - you owe it to yourself to see it. Incredible performances from Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne and a story that'll just yank you in.
4. The book challenge - well, I picked heavy books for that list and I sort of fell into a crevasse about it. I've been reading (I actually finished five books this month, all nonfiction, ranging from a short series of vignettes about women explorers to a fascinating examination of the origin on modern forensic science), and I'm determined to start Faulkner's Light in August since it's, well, August. Check back in a few weeks to see how I'm doing on that.
5. As for the 5K challenge - I've had surgery to clear my airway (read about that in my previous post) and am back to running. A good thing, since I agreed with a friend - we'll call her "Bawlmer Hon" here at the Nest - to participate in next summer's Ramblin' Rose mini-triathlon. It'll be a hoot getting ready for that, let me tell you!

Huh. Looking back, I'd say it's been a good month. It hasn't always felt like that (surgery, school, chores, uncertainty), which is why these posts matter. There are days that are great, days that are good, and some days that are pretty much meh. The trick is to look at the overall pattern.

And hey - it's still summer!  Go enjoy it!

Shh! The Secret Plan Hollywood Doesn't Want You to Know About!

 Like many women, I have occasionally fallen prey to splashy headlines that promise maximum results for minimum effort.  The chirpy vow of "Lose 2 Sizes in 5 Days!" has caused my hand to stretch out almost without conscious effort more than once.  Not just dieting headlines, either - "Organize Instantly!" and "Just Exercise 5 Minutes a Day!" also draw my attention.

Well, it's a bad habit.  A nasty, ugly, bad habit and it stops today.

There are a lot of things I want to change and in the past, I've tried to change them all at once, without bothering to figure out why I do some of the wacky things I do in the first place.  See, I tend to overdo, which (in my case, anyway) leads to an inevitable crash and burn cycle.  Give me strict dietary rules and I'll follow 'em like a lab rat - until I get desperately tired of hot water with lemon before I've washed my face.  So I skip the green tea one morning and go straight for the dollar store candy.  Or I feel a vague sense of "am I kidding me?" at sneaking baby carrots into the movie theater and go for the blue raspberry slushie.  (Seriously - "blue raspberry"?  What is that, exactly?)  Or I miss a "run day" and feel like a slightly more stylish version of Jabba the Hutt.  Or I fail to pick up the kitchen counter one evening and feel like the whole house is due to be condemned by the Board of Health.  And I feel large, unwieldy, unworthy, and sad.

In the last few weeks, I've slowed down enough to take a good look around.  Here's a sampling of the things I found out.

• I stress eat.  And not salads.  I can do something about that.
• I'm not very good at this running stuff. I can do something about that.
• A house is messy when someone moves back into it.  I can do something about that.
• Working too hard for too long will lead to Bad Things and yes, I can do something about that.
• Good relationships don't keep score about who folded the laundry and I can definitely do something about that.

What to me is an epiphany is often to other people a moment of, "Well, yeah."  By demanding that I simultaneously excel in all aspects of my life, I've set myself up to fail at just about all of them. Blasted perfectionism - I thought you and I had had a talk about that, but no.  I bought in to the glossy magazine pictures, forgetting that Photoshop has a lot to do with those pictures and stylists have a lot to do with the rest.  In short, it seems that I've been as crazy as a rat in a coffee can.

So here's my headline - I'm calling this my WILD NEW SUMMER PLAN to Energize Your Life, Love Yourself, Look Great (and Have your House Look Great, Too!)

Really, the whole thing can all be summed up as ENJOY MORE! but in keeping with the whole glossy magazine, self-help thingie, here's my simple 10-step plan to get there:

• Drink more plain ol' water, but remember that a Diet Coke twice a week or so isn't criminal.
• Eat more foods that haven't been processed to the point of being unrecognizable, but it's okay to have that mini-bagel as part of breakfast.  In other words, don't throw out edible food just due to the presence of white flour, but buy better next time.
• Cut out the crap candy and enjoy - just a little! - really good dark chocolate.
• Run anyway.  Sure, my goal of a 40 minute 5K is a small one, but that doesn't mean it's not worth reaching.
• Mark something off the "take care of the house" list five days a week even if it's just flicking the feather duster around while boogie-ing to Earth, Wind & Fire.  Yes, it'll make the cats run and hide, but that's really their problem, isn't it?
• No one's calling Hoarders about the dust bunnies.
• I'm a full-growed woman, which means I have curves and yes, sags.  Ignore the scale and remember that the only "hotness" reading that ought to matter to me comes from FryDaddy, who thinks I'm pretty gosh-darned keen. Just as well - I'd probably break a 20-year-old, anyway.  So fragile.
• Speaking of FryDaddy - he's moved home, so why not enjoy having him there? Checking work e-mails with my morning coffee isn't a good way to start the day, so stop it.
• When I'm berating myself for not measuring up to whatever wackadoodle standard I'm trying to use, stop and ask myself, "Would I let some stranger talk to my best friend that way?" If the answer is "no," then I need to stop talking to myself like that.
• Spend some time every morning and every evening just being still.  I've got more than the average amount of gifts in my life to be grateful for, and it's polite to pay attention.

Will this plan make me a Zen lama in a kickin' bikini?  Nope.  (Funny mental image, though.)  But I'm starting to really believe that being Real might just be better.

Race Day!

As regular readers of this blog know, I set some rather large goals for 2014 - "large" in terms of changing some ingrained habits.  I've been checking in here with progress reports every couple of weeks, both as a way to stay accountable, even when I get off track (instead of doing the much easier thing, which is to slink off into the shadows), and also as a way to hopefully encourage other people to take the plunge.  To paraphrase Buffy Summers, the problem with change is that after you do it, everything is changed.  We often don't really want to do that. Change is hard and it can be uncomfortable, so sometimes, even if our habits aren't especially good ones - well, we know what to expect.

One of my goals was to increase my exercise level this year and I knew this was going to be a tough one.  I've long been a walker and a day-hiker, and I've tried my hand at everything from swimming to spinning, but nothing's ever really stuck.  But I have friends who regularly post about their exercise journeys - deadlifting, running, triathlons (!), roller derby - the list goes on and on. Also - let's face it - I'm getting older and it's harder to stay in shape.  At 20, a couple of nights of dancing and I'd drop four pounds.  Now, I have a much more sedentary lifestyle - I love writing and teaching, but you don't exactly burn calories while you do it and pounds are much more stubborn than they were once-upon-a-time.

So back on Christmas Eve, I committed to my goal of "participating in a 5K race."  My rules were simple - I didn't have to actually run the whole thing, but I had to finish and the race had to be held sometime in 2014.  That was it.  I found a "Couch to 5K" app and podcast and began what I called "training" and some would probably call "seriously?" Due to a subglottic stenosis (a fancy way of saying I have scar tissue in my trachea), getting enough wind for a sustained run was (and continues to be) an issue.  And I'm not sure I'd recommend beginning to train in the dead of winter.  But I did it.  Three times a week, I'd bundle up, plug in, and lumber my way through my (extremely hilly) neighborhood or around a track.  Let me be clear - I didn't always like it.  I had days I wanted to skip.  I had nights I was sore and achy.  I was slow.  It took me longer than the 8 weeks laid out in the podcast, as I had weeks I needed to repeat to feel confident that I was ready to move up to the next level. But I kept going.  Even if I grumbled about it, I kept going.  I began packing my running shoes when I was away from home and slowly, I saw improvement.  At the start of January, two minutes of slow jogging was hard; in mid-March, I could do more than 20 at a go and eventually, that was up to a half hour.  (I felt like a rockstar when that happened, by the way.  I also nearly cried, which rockstars probably don't do.  This was a big goal and I think every week I did at least one training session convinced that I couldn't do this.)

When I reached the next-to-last week of the podcast training, I signed up for my first 5K and my friends backed me up ferociously.  I had "atta girls" and signs of support galore.  Friends made me a race t-shirt and helped me knot a tutu.  My beloved husband never said a word that wasn't supportive and encouraging.  The only dissenting voice in this whole thing was - well, it was mine.  Luckily, I had enough support to tell that voice to shut up and take a hike.

For my first (but not my last!) 5K, I picked a "color run," which is an untimed race on a flat course, with "color stations" set up at different points.  As you pass through the color stations, volunteers spray/toss brightly colored cornstarch on you and at the end of the race, there's a dance party in front of the main stage where you fling your own pack of color into the air.  It's messy, silly, and joyously fun.  I saw little girls in pink tutus.  I saw grown women in sequined tutus.  I saw large men in small tutus.  I saw kids being pushed in strollers and one woman in a wheelchair.  I saw runners and walkers and joggers and limpers. And everyone was welcome.  Everyone.  A little kid complimented me on my homemade tutu and an off-duty cop keeping order on the route slapped my hand in respect of me running my first 5K.  I was covered in purple cornstarch - I even had it on my teeth.  And yeah, I had to walk a little of it here and there - but I finished.

Me. I. Finished. A. Five. Kilometer. Race.

What was my time?  Not a clue.  Somewhere between 35 and 50 minutes, I think.  There will be other races where I worry about the time. And yes - I'm going to keep running.  I'd like to improve my time and my form and - oh, everything.  I've found running (jogging, wobbling, whatever) to be very contemplative.  It really is just you, your head, and the road.

Consider giving it a try.

Halfway - January!

Last year, I had a lot of success with posting "halfway through the month" check-ins to keep me accountable for my progress and my "course corrections," so I'm going to continue that - don't mess with what works, I say!  (And no, we haven't gotten that sort of ice you see in the picture; but it's been COLD!!)

For 2014, I set five goals (they're all laid out in this post) - but in brief, they are all designed to help me be calmer, happier, and healthier.  Tall orders indeed, so I got specific with these five goals:

1.  Work "zone cleaning" into my housekeeping
2.  Keep a stringent budget to lower our household debt
3.  Train to participate in a 5K race sometime this year
4.  Read six "good books" that had slipped past me
5.  Watch 24 "good movies" that had slipped past me

So - two weeks into the New Year, how's it going?

I've been told that success is rarely total in science.  The same can be said for resolutions, but there is progress to report, so yay.

I'm working in the zone cleaning, although it's going to take a while for it to become an automatic "thing."  The FlyLady system gives you a daily task to do Monday through Friday and I'd worked those in (they're easy, quick to do, and yes - you feel like you've accomplished something when you take ten minutes and tear through your overstuffed sock drawer to get rid of the orphan socks!), but I was intimidated by the longer checklists for the "deep cleaning."  Turns out - pshaw! - just keep in mind that anything you do is more than you have been doing and move on.  For instance, last week was the "kitchen week."  I did really well in there - even cleaned the baked-on gunk in the oven - but didn't get everything done.  Well, that's okay; I'll get it next month when I'm back there.  I also didn't insist that I do the whole thing in one day.  By picking a couple of small things off the checklist each day (mornings are best for me), it wasn't so bad.

The budget.  Sigh.  January is a harsh month.  There were a couple of large unplanned for expenses (such as paying my annual fee to access an unlimited amount of legal continuing education seminars - a great deal, but a limited time offer) that have set me back this month.  But there's light at the end of that tunnel.  I've been employed at my state job long enough to qualify (for the first time ever!) for something called "longevity pay."  Essentially, it's a annual bonus given to employees to reward them for not running screaming into the night before certain benchmarks have passed - in my case, ten years.  (Bureaucracy at work - last January marked my ten-year anniversary; you wait another entire year [the anniversary of your anniversary] to be awarded the bonus.)  I had hoped to put the entire thing toward bills, but that's okay.  It'll get us back on track when I receive it at the end of the month.

The 5K training - okay, here's some joy.  I started an app called "Couch to 5K" and have been huffing and puffing around my neighborhood and the college's walking track for three weeks now.  The third week was just about to kill me, so I reluctantly decided to repeat it.  At that point, I also found a similar program in podcast form, which allowed me to put down the iPad and use a much smaller iPod.  (No smartphone for this girl.)  The podcast talks me through things, instead of just serving as a glorified stopwatch and yesterday (Day 2 of the three-day session), I managed to do the entire thing without stopping.  Mind you, there's not much grace or power involved and my speed resembles a three-toed sloth much more than a lean cheetah, but I've been reassured that it'll come, it'll come.  And the support I've received with this goal has been amazing! Thank you all!

On the book side, I've picked my first one - Forster's A Passage to India.  I'm in the middle of finishing The Round House for my book club, then I'll start on Passage.  I'm looking forward to it; I've always enjoyed Forster's work.

On the movie side, I've watched Orson Welles' Touch of Evil and I have Bad Day at Black Rock recorded (thanks, TCM!).  Honestly, Touch of Evil confounded me a bit.  Typical Welles - it's gorgeously shot, with intricate framing and (of course) that incredible opening one-take crane shot.  (We watched the restored version - Welles was famous with fighting with the studios over editing and apparently the studio wanted opening credits to roll over that crane shot - Welles was right to fight over that one.)  I have to say, though, despite the subject matter being interesting - race, corruption, border turf wars - the plot's just a mess.  Charlton Heston said that one of his biggest mistakes as an actor was not using an accent for his character in this movie - his Mexican D.A. sounds all Hollywood Hills, so I have to agree with him there.  All in all, an interesting film that I'm glad I saw, but I'm not entirely sure I'd recommend.

Not bad for two weeks in!