Downscaling

Chaos vs. calm

May 18th, 2012 Be the first to Encourage Me!

I don’t like stress. So when I have to have chaos in my life, I like to pile it on it a big steaming heap.

For example, the day I have to go for my pre-surgical check up, when I need my blood pressure to keep it on the down low, well that’s a FABULOUS day to have half a dozen strangers in my house to install two new floors. Sure the hardwood in my office and the tile in the kitchen will look amazing once it’s done, but right now the refrigerator is in the dining room, the stove is in the hall and everything for my office is crammed into a spare bedroom. Disorder really agitates my mild case of OCD.

Yes, my BP was a tad high yesterday, and despite the fact that I’ve been eating enough bananas to feed the monkey house at the zoo, my potassium was a tad low, but I passed my physical and my knee replacement surgery is scheduled for 8 a.m. Monday.

And, once the grout dries and we get all the appliances put back where they belong, I can enjoy these great new floors before I go under the knife. A good stress investment in my opinion.

Goodbye, fugly linoleum, hello porcelain tile.

Counting the days

May 7th, 2012 Be the first to Encourage Me!

I am getting a brand new bionic knee two weeks from today. In just a mere 14 days, the knee cap and joint I was born with will be in a medical waste bag. I won’t miss it a bit. It’s been a real bitch to me the last few years.

I will have then have a piece of technology attached to my muscles that should let me walk, stand, even sleep without pain.

Except it’s going to be really, really, really painful after surgery, or so I am told. Mr. Vicodin will be my new BFF while I learn to walk again.

I am excited and scared out of my scattered little mind.

First of all, I am in manageable pain now. It hurts all the time, but if I don’t move too much and take lots of painkillers, then I can bear it. However, not moving and counting the calories in Tramadol tablets into my daily allowance is not a good lifestyle choice for me. So I have to endure intense pain, much worse than I feel now, before I can live a life without chronic pain.

This is some kind of sick joke, right?

Second, hospitals are not my favorite places. I pretty much hate everything about hospitals — the constant checks of vital signs, the tubes, the humiliation of things like bedpans. I’ve had some awful experiences in hospitals, more than I’ve had good ones. And one of the worst happened at the hospital where I am going.

Third, I had a dream last night that I got a post-surgical infection and they amputated my right leg below the knee. That shit, while highly unlikely, happens. Also? Years ago, I had a former boss who died in the hospital of a post-surgical blood clot. That shit happens.

Fourth, I am told the physical therapy for a total knee replacement is particularly brutal.

So yeah, I am a little apprehensive. I could barely sleep last night, tossing and turning due to nightmares and soreness in my knee. Couldn’t make it into work this morning. I let “The Today Show” and sheer exhaustion lull me to sleep for about an hour, but that’s all the rest my knee would give me.

Since then I’ve been laying around, watching cooking shows and reading. I can’t seem to concentrate on much of anything. I am supposed to be walking in Manhattan in less than 90 days for BlogHer 12. I want to stroll Central Park. I want to wander Broadway and Times Square. I want to see my online friends live and in person.

I want to walk without pain.

But I have to get through a lot more pain before I get there.

Fourteen days. I am scared shitless.

All the things I can’t say

March 30th, 2012 2 Encouraging Words

I would love to be able to spill my guts here (disgusting as that visual is) but alas, I cannot. The thing about the Internet is that what you throw out there lasts forever. Words are too powerful to tossed around lightly.

So let’s just say my stomach is having a violent reaction to recent events, even if my mind and soul have found an ample amount of peace.

When you have to choke down your feelings– like some bit of rancid food that you are forced to swallow just to be polite– sometimes you can’t force it. The physical reaction can be more powerful the emotional and mental. And so I had a rough night.

But today is a brand new day. And as soon as my body catches up with the rest of me, I want my day back. I don’t want to lose another minute of my life to all the things I can’t say.

Bluer than blue, but a new attitude

March 29th, 2012 3 Encouraging Words

My family got a bit of bad news today. Nothing earth-shattering; no one is sick, no one lost their job, nothing is really broken. Something we had hoped for didn’t pan out, and you know, that happens. At least the waiting to hear is over, and that’s the worst part.

Heartbreaker

Tom Petty? He was 100 percent right when he wailed, “The waaaaaaiting is the haaaaardest part.”

So, since the change I was hoping for isn’t happening and I feel really bummed about that, I may need to do something really radical just to shake things up around here. Wallowing in my self-pity like a pig wallows in mud has not really been working for me.

It’s time to get my ass in gear and make things happen, you know what I mean? Sure you do.

Last night, while we were still playing the waaaaaaaiting game, I had so much nervous energy I couldn’t sit still and I had no appetite. Yeah, you read that right. I finally found an emotional state that would not be calmed by high-calorie food, booze and sleep. I know. I was amazed too. Especially since I know me and that has been how I roll for 40+ years.

I went to the gym. See, I’ve heard people SAY that working out relieves stress. I always assumed those people were stoned or just nasty little liars. I have always associated working out with pain on top of pain with a side of pain and a dash of humiliation.

But I walked around the indoor track, because that’s all my bum knee would allow, and a friend joined me and it made a mile go by so fast I barely realized I was sweating.

Then I changed into my swimsuit and headed to the pool area. The warm therapy pool, as usual, inhabited by hillbillies, but there was a single lane open in the cold pool, which was wonderful. It’s been unseasonably warm here in Small City for weeks, and there is no air conditioning in our building because this should have been the perfect time of year to replace the HVAC except did I mention it’s been unseasonable FREAKIN’ HOT! My office hits 90 degrees ever afternoon.

Freedom

Add extreme heat on top of anxious waiting and you have a fat woman dying to float in a cold pool.

Nothing felt better than getting in that water. My legs and knees ached from the walk, but I still did my aerobics in the pool and swam a few laps. Then I just floated, letting the coolness soothe my sweat and my aching soul. The pool is the only place I can be weightless. I felt free for the first time in a long time.

I also feel motivated to get serious about dropping pounds and getting stronger. And making a few other positive changes in my life. While I am still nursing the blues, I am going to test drive this whole work-out-to-release-stress thing some more.

And if skipping Sonic to go to the gym doesn’t make me all giddy inside, maybe I will go out and buy a new dinette set. Just because I want one.

Aftermath

March 16th, 2012 2 Encouraging Words

So I just had a panic attack about an hour ago.

The catalyst was a slight startle, something done gently and meant to protect me from harm. It came on the heels of weeks of stress. I always think my anxiety is at an all-time high and yet somehow it always manages to climb to another level I’d never envisioned in my nightmares. My nervous system is an over-achiever, apparently.

Well played, anxiety disorder, well played indeed. I didn’t see it coming at the moment it happened. Total surprise. You win.

I am trying to write this quickly while I still remember it, while the pain is still fresh and before I collapse. It was just a startle. But that was the second one today — actually the third today and the fifth in the last two weeks. My emotions have been a shit stew of worry over things I can neither control or write about here, so I guess it’s been building.

My body reacted slowly at first, then it hit hyperspeed. When faced with fight-or-flight, I always fly. ALWAYS.

Who knew an old lady with arthritis could do deep knee bends while her stomach contracted? Who knew that while she felt like fireworks were booming behind her eyeballs and brain cells were firing back at the eyeball explosions that she would still have the presence of mind to continue COOKING?

By the way, people who are not in control their emotions really shouldn’t play with fire. Didn’t stop me, though.

So I started ranting and pacing in between cooking tasks, because the excess energy HAS to go somewhere. I started grabbing things and moving things and arranging things, all while begging the universe to explain to me why some people think it’s funny to startle someone because, other than Halloween, I JUST DON’T SEE THE HUMOR.

I stirred the rice, I checked the roast, I paced some more. I ranted a lot. I can’t remember everything I said but I am sure there was hand-wringing and I almost hyperventilated. I was able to catch my breath finally, due in large part I believe to the margarita I had guzzled in my earlier celebration of the event that is Friday.

Word: Tequila is like the brain whisperer.

My husband was upset because he’s the one who accidentally startled me and because I was pacing like a caged animal and because I was sure I had ruined the sauce for the roast. OK, that was me that was upset about the sauce. He was upset that he unintentionally triggered me.

I cried. He sympathized from a distance, which is what he knows to do because I can’t have anyone in my personal space when my nerves are dancing on top of my skin. He’s learned that over the years. I cried until my eyes were swollen and my face was flushed.

Then I got my shit together enough to serve dinner because I cannot NOT finish something. If I don’t finish, I fail and I can’t let that happen no matter how much pain I feel.

And now? All I want to do is crawl under the covers, swallow my meds with a big glass of cold water, and sleep until next Friday. I can’t watch basketball. I can’t read. I can’t do anything I had planned to do tonight. I feel raw and exposed and afraid and exhausted and burned. I am consumed with guilt from not being able to cope and I feel ashamed that I hurt the one who loves me the most.

But I had to write this down. I had to. Because this energy has to go somewhere.

Winning at pinning

March 3rd, 2012 2 Encouraging Words

Among the many afflictions I have, you know, besides anxiety, depression and an eating disorder, is an obsessive personality. I latch on to something and I do not let go. Until I am bored with it. So we might need to sprinkle a little ADD into the kooky soup. Have I mentioned I am pretty sure I am also pre-menopausal? I think I am a gourmet recipe of bat shit craziness right now.

As I have mentioned here before, I have a big cyber crush on Pinterest. I can spend hours pinning photos of my dream house and all the trendy clothes I would wear and the bags I would carry if money wasn’t a huge, unmovable object. I love to pin recipes and have made many of them and not one yet that has disappointed me, so there’s a real upside to all this pinning. Lately I have also pinned a crafty thing or two.

I am SO not crafty, folks. AT ALL. I write and like to take photos and mess around with photo software. That’s the end of my creativity.

But I did see a pin about recycling candles, and I thought to myself: You’ve got a lot of scraping-the-bottom candles and some of them are Yankee candles and they don’t give those things away for free you know and all you are going to do is toss them in the trash and maybe you could afford one of those trendy bags if you didn’t waste so much money expensive wax .

Priorities are not my strong suit, people. Clearly run-on sentences are, though.

Anyway, I decided to recycle these candles and I really expected to burn my house down since this involved the stove and it did not involve food. Why? Refer back to the sentence two paragraphs up. SO not crafty.

I started with a coffee-colored, mocha-scented candle. I put the glass candle holder in a pot of water and let it boil unti the candle wax was liquified. Then I used some old tongs to fetch the original wick from of the warm wax. When the wax was completely melted, I used the tongs to lift the glass out of the water and a pair of Ove Gloves to hold the jar while I poured the aromatic wax into a clean, tall Ball jar.

Inside the Ball jar was a long wick I bought at Michaels, and it’s clipped onto to a stick to hold it in the middle of the wax. Easy peasy, folks.

And? The house smellls AH-mazing. Better than when the candle actually burns.

So then, as it indicated on Pinterest, I decided to melt more candle remnants, you know, to make a layered candle. So I floated three smalls in the water and it worked like magic. Only when I poured in the clear wax it didn’t layer with the brown wax because the mocha candle was still liquid. So it just blended.

No biggie really, since these candles were vanilla scented and had no color, but I realized that if I really wanted the layered look, I was going to have to let the first wax get good and hard before adding more hot wax.

That last portion of the sentence could totally be porn, couldn’t it? Get your mind out of the gutter.

Anyway, I put the still-warm-and-wet-but-not-steaming-hot candle wax (out of the gutter!) in the Ball jar into the fridge so it could have a chance to cool.

And that’s when I realized when it was hard, it would be cold. So it would have to let the candle come back to room temperature before I poured more hot wax into it. And that’s when I realized this could take ALL DAMN DAY depending on how many fucking candles remnants I wanted to layer.

Jeez O’Pete, didn’t count on that.

But? Still worth it. Because did I mention that the house smells AH-mazing? Yeah, it totally does. And it’s easy. And it makes me feel a twee bit crafty and less wasteful. And it seems to help me justify all those stolen hours pinning photos of London, inspirational quotes and memes of foul-mouthed animals.

Hunker down comfort food

February 19th, 2012 2 Encouraging Words

Today, the front of my house looks like this:

So that means it’s a hunker down, lazy kind of Sunday. And on those kinds of Sundays, I like comfort food. And by comfort food, I mean soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, because what else feels as comforting as that on a snowy day? A pan of chocolate brownies doesn’t count since this blog is SUPPOSED to be about losing weight.

I have a recipe for a chicken corn chowder that is amazing, BUT, it requires practically a gallon of half-and-half (only a slight exaggeration) and so it’s NOT at all figure friendly. While I was stuck in the HELL that was my orthopedist appointment last week, I was thumbing through a 2-year-old Better Homes and Gardens magazine and found a corn chowder recipe with no cream. And it actually sounded wonderful.

So I wrote down the recipe, and today I tweaked it a little to add some Mexican flavor. The aroma of this soup cooking filled the house with the kind of comfort and joy you feel at the holidays. And since I saved so many calories and fat grams by leaving cream out of the chowder, I figured I could afford a little grilled cheese sandwich to go with it. And a little bit of shredded cheese on top of the soup.

This is the soup recipe the way I tweaked it. You tweak it anyway you like.

The stuff:

1 cup of chopped onions
1 cleaned and chopped leek
1 seeded jalapeno, finely chopped
5 cups frozen corn (about two 12 oz. bags)
28 oz. chicken broth
1 chopped red and green pepper
Tbsp. olive oil
Optional: Add a cup of cooked, cubed chicken pieces to make the soup more hearty (great way to use leftovers!)
Cilantro for garnish

The steps:

Sautee the onions, leek and jalapeno in 4 qt. Dutch oven with a tablespoon of olive oil. Add corn and half the broth. Bring to boil; reduce to simmer for 20 minutes. Take off the heat and let the soup cool slightly. Put about half the soup in a blender and puree it or use an immersion blender and blend about half the mixture to thicken the soup; add the rest of the broth, the peppers and the chicken pieces. Simmer for another 10-15 minutes. Makes about six bowls of incredibly flavorful, rich soup that does not seem to miss the fat and calories of cream.

Top with fresh cilantro and a wee bit of shredded cheese if you like. I liked.

Total recall

February 17th, 2012 1 Encouragement

I’m about to shake (off) what my mama gave me.

At the ripe young age of 48 (or as I like to call it 40-late) I am having my right knee replaced in a little more than a month. Add that to my tonsils, uterus and the meniscus of this right knee to the pile of my discarded body parts.

Before and after

The meniscus tore into shreds when I fell off a ladder in 2003. Within months I had it all scoped out. Basically that means there is no cartilage cushion in my knee, which means the femur and the tibia rest pretty much on each others nerves. AND OUCH OMG PAIN YIKES FUCKITY FUCK!

Cortisone shots have helped, but now that relief only last a few weeks. So my knee cap? It’s time to go.

I am a little nervous but mostly excited. The idea of being able to walk with minimal difficulty is exciting. The idea of major surgery is always a little nerve-wracking. I lost a friend a few years back to complications of a much more routine surgery.

But I prefer to dwell on the bright side. That is, of course, after I had an anxiety attack at the orthopedist’s office when he seemed reluctant to help me. Before we look at your x-rays, he asked, have you thought of gastric bypass surgery to drop some weight and thus pressure off that knee? It’s just physics, he explained.

Um yeah, I’ve thought about “dropping some weight” for about 40 DAMN YEARS NOW, THANKS! Hard to do when you can barely walk, I am just saying. But could you be a peach and warn me ahead of time if putting the bionic knee in will hurt or help my weekly Weight Watcher scale step? Thanks again.

And then I had an emotional meltdown. So then he looks at my x-rays and concluded, yeah, that knee’s gotta go.

Later that evening, over a healthy dinner of sushi, I was telling my husband about my teary plea to get rid of this knee. I swear the knee decided to fight back. Even after the cortisone, which usually makes it happy, it got damned angry.

“Get rid of me? After 48 years of your klutzy abuse and bad dancing? After 48 years of toting your thunder thighs and shelf ass around? Just tossed in a medical waste bag and replaced with metal and screws? BITCH PLEASE!,” said my knee, and it proceeded SHUT DOWN, making movement very painful for hours.

True story. That’s why I am writing this blog entry at 5 a.m. waiting for my next dose of Advil.

Morale of the story: Never let your body parts know they are on their way out. They take it very personally. And always remember that you were born to dance. And never take “maybe you want to drop some weight” for an answer if you know that’s not what keeps you from busting a really smooth move.

Carnivale

February 11th, 2012 2 Encouraging Words

This week has been a long strange trip, so it’s only appropriate that it ends with a masquerade ball.

That’s not a euphemism for anything; husband and I will be twirling the dance floor tonight a Carnivale-themed masquerade fundraiser for the local symphony orchestra.

(It’s a long story, and weird considering we don’t even like symphony music.I don’t like any music without lyrics, to be honest.)

Part of my goal to make me feel better about myself this year — thus raising my self esteem and hopefully boosting my overall health and weight loss — includes going to therapy, adopting healthier life habits and doing little things to improve my appearance.

To that end, I am taking the extra two minutes to put eye makeup on every morning and investing a few seconds on better skin care. I even wrote a guest product review about a really great eye cream I’ve been using. (Seriously, add this blog to your reader. The ladies who run it do a great job.)

This week I have been a little negligent in taking care of myself. My arthritis went into serious overdrive and there were days that just walking was difficult. I didn’t make the best nutritional choices; I didn’t get enough rest and exercise– mostly due to the knee pain; I let a few challenges at work burrow under my skin and get me stressed.

Hey, I am new at this “put yourself first” thing.

But tonight I am going all out– makeup, cute shoes, poofy red dress, and the mask pictured here for the whole Carnivale theme. It will be like the movie “Eyes Wide Shut” only not creepy and certainly no orgy because, ew.

(If that’s your scene, rock on with your bad self. No judgment here. But I don’t want to share every experience in my life. For me, singer George Michael said it best: “Sex is best when it’s one-on-one.”)

I plan to burn some calories by slowly waltzing around the dance floor with my handsome husband, who will be rocking a sexy tux.

I think all women need at least one night when they feel red-carpet ready– glamorous and beautiful. And I think we all need to take the time to care for ourselves every day. I faltered a little bit at that this week, but tonight I am making up for it. And when Cinderella leaves the ball with both shoes on her feet, she’ll remember that every day should have a little Carnivale in it.

Beauty and the beasts

February 8th, 2012 Be the first to Encourage Me!

I am a fan of Ellen Degeneres. I consider her to be a beautiful, funny, smart person as well as a fabulous dancer. I would be delighted to have her as a friend.

She is openly gay. I support equal rights for gay people because, you know, rights are rights. And for this to be a truly free nation based on justice, we have to have equal rights for all people– gay and straight, because that’s what equal means.

And I am not just saying that because I like Ellen. I’d say that even if I didn’t think she was awesome. Which I do.

I mean, just because I don’t like someone or agree with how they live their lives doesn’t mean I get to dictate my opinions to them and deny them basic civil liberties.

For example, I do not agree with the way certain members of the group One Million Moms live their lives. They seem like a humorless bunch of bigots and I worry that they are raising their children to be humorless bigots, too, and my daughter and future grandchildren will have to interact with them.

But just because I don’t agree with their lifestyle– and think they should not be allowed to adopt kids because they will indoctrinate them with that lifestyle– doesn’t mean they aren’t entitled to the same rights as everyone else.

Sure, I wish they wouldn’t flaunt their mean-spirited choices in my face by influencing retailers to take a delicious and cleverly named flavor of ice cream off store shelves, but far be it for me to deny them freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment.

But just as they have the right to speak, I have the right to do the opposite of anything they suggest. For example, I now plan to do much more of my shopping at J.C. Penney.

Not that I plan to abandon Macy’s because true love cannot be denied, but JCP, you won my respect today.