Good Weekend and Other Musings

I had a very nice weekend, thank you! Friday night I saw "Contagion" - it was creepy. Don't touch me, you're all germy and will probably kill me! It was a good reminder to me, though, that I am completely unprepared for emergencies at our new home. It's time to stock the flashlights and batteries and all that good stuff. Always a good thing to do as fall and winter come our way. (Uh, the correlation here is that a lethal virus was going around the world, and there were runs on the grocery stores, etc. as people holed up in their houses for safety. Sometimes I forget to connect the dots when I write. Or speak.)

Saturday morning I got up semi-early and drove myself over to sunny eastern Washington, where I baked in the 80+ degree weather and hunted wineries. I didn't hunt too hard, though, because the roads were crawling with cops! It was the wineries' fall "Crush the Grape" festival, so it was easy pickin's for law enforcement. And since my license plate does actually say "IM HIGH," well, I don't want to get pulled over with wine on my breath. :) I try not to make their jobs too easy for them - where's the sport in that?

In one teeny little town, there are five wineries located on a cul-de-sac at the end of a dead end street. I thought I'd swing in there - but as I turned onto the dead end street, I noticed two cops sitting in lawn chairs at the *exit* to the street. Umm, I'll pass on the wine, thanks.

Sunday I did the police volunteer thing and, while it was a slow day, my partner and I got to watch Air Force One take off, since President Obama was in town for fundraising.

A nice weekend, all told! My eating was fine. I did buy pita chips and hummus for dinner on the way back, but the hummus hit my stomach hard and painfully. Maybe I shouldn't have bought the roasted garlic flavor (which had tons of garlic on top, that I stirred into the hummus). I did buy a small bag of chocolate-coated Chukar Cherries, which have been the bane of my existence this week and I've been making my coworkers eat them.

Perhaps not coincidentally, as I say this in the same breath as "chocolate-coated cherries," my weight loss is stalled again. I'm so over it. :) It will start up again - my eating is generally quite good, I would say. I think that my mental perception of my new physique is catching up to reality, because I am pretty much who I expect to see in the mirror now. Sometimes it still takes me by surprise. I am also experiencing a bit of a reality check with my new body - which I'm no longer simply seeing as "NEW AND IMPROVED" but also as "A WORK IN PROGRESS." Not even that long ago, I was thinking, "where on earth will 35-45 more pounds come from?" Now that I am growing accustomed to my weight loss, I think I am realistically seeing that yes, there is much more work to be done. All the mental trickery that goes on in your head from rapid weight loss is quite interesting - it's a surreal and difficult to describe feeling to no longer know your reflection in the mirror!

I'm at a crossroads, brought about by the change in seasons, among other things. I am a born hibernator. When the weather turns cold and gloomy, which is easily six months out of the year in Seattle, I am perfectly content to curl up on the couch with a blankie and a book. Or I'm content for about 3-4 months of that, then I spend the next 3 months or so battling depression and a deep desire to move far, far away. But those will be subjects for February 2012's blog entries, haha.

For now, I'm entering hibernation mode. So it's time to work on warding off the winter doldrums. First order of business: blood work. I need to call the hematologist that I saw for all the iron IV supplements. When my WLS surgeon ran my blood work last month, my iron was still lower than it was supposed to be, according to the hematologist's recommendations. And my vitamin D levels are still in the toilet. I have prescription iron supplements, which I do not take, because they give me such a freaking stomachache!

When it comes to vitamins and supplements, I'll confess that I just really suck at taking them. I have discussed this at length with my surgeon and have been appropriately chastised and admonished. Ugh, I hate them, though. And somewhat recently, I got cocky and took two calcium supplements at a time, and I think one got stuck in my sleeve, because I was HELLA NAUSEOUS for quite awhile. It was yucky.

Okay, so bloodwork. Supplements. Call hematologist, start taking supplements. Bah.

Exercise. Oh, look at you, Ms. Lazybones! Not doing those stairs too often these days, are you? I am still walking to the bus stop when I can, but realistically, that's only 1-2x a week. It's just over a mile, which isn't terrible, but it's pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things. I need to do more. I have been trying to rally myself into doing my "Performance 90" dvds (the precursor to P90X) early, early in the morning. This is the only consistent time I could work out every day. My kids come and go throughout the week and we have all sorts of obligations that make evenings a challenge. But if I can drag my ass up in the morning, it would help a lot.

Plus I need to kick my stairbuddy's butt and remind her that motivation is a two-way street. If I am not the one spurring us on, she is remarkably silent on completing our work out. Now that things have calmed down at work, it is a good time to run stairs again. I don't think I ever mentioned it on the blog, but time/time-monitoring is a high stress issue at work, and unfortunately my stair climbing had become quite the topic of conversation in the office (in a positive sense) but it led to me feeling very, very nervous about doing it - even though it was break time. Just not something I wanted to call undue attention to, and so I bagged it. Temporarily.

I feel like a broken record - it's not the first time I've blogged about wanting/needing to get my exercise back on track. It's one of those things that when I do, I feel great. When I stop, I am happy to stop and don't particularly miss it. But this is about changing lifestyles and creating new habits. Just do it, already. (There's a Nike shirt for you!)