Successterol!

Cholesterol down from 247 to 160 in six months. Now that's what I call success! Yeah baby!

Are we there yet?

We were in Springfield, IL last weekend. It was 86 degrees on Sunday. I laid on a lounge chair on the deck in the sun like a cat and fell asleep. My winter weary bones were quite happy to feel warmth again.

In spite of my love for flora, I hate Spring. I especially hate Spring in Wisconsin. I hate the roller coaster ride of warmth and sun teasing me and then turning to cold with snow/rain. I hate the way it drags out and goes on for weeks and weeks. I have no patience for that cycle and it depresses me. It is getting steadily warmer by an average few degrees per week so I guess we're going in the right direction.

On another note, in an effort to increase my good cholesterol and reduce my bad cholesterol (not to mention my pants size) I've committed to a 3day per week routine at the gym. This started sometime around the 1st of the year but I have yet to make it 3 days in any one week. Today might be the day!

Here again, losing weight and gaining fitness is such a long, drawn out process with highs and lows. I have very little patience for the ongoing cycle - too bad I've done it nearly all my life.

In other news, I am studying to take the CMA (Certified Management Accountant) exam in Sept/Oct this year. I've discovered there's an awful lot of information that I don't know or don't remember. This exam typically has somewhere between a 50% to 60% pass rate. This is not going to be a piece of cake.

I believe it was the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland who said, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Okay, so I think I know where I'm going and I'm on the right road, are we there yet?

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Turn and face the strange, changes.

I'm starting a club that I'm going to call PMC for "peri-menopause club". Peri meaning "around" or "about" and of course you know the rest. Back in the day this was spoken of in hushed tones, as in, "she's in her changes" and supposedly we all knew what that meant. I just found out a bunch of stuff about being pre-menopausal that I wish I had known about six months ago... it would have saved me a lot of "WTF" moments. No one told me about all this stuff! I knew about hot flashes, hahaha that's hilarious comedic material right there, not. And even night sweats, although no one really wants to talk about those, kinda gross. But no one said anything about debilitating fatigue, depression, moodiness, irritability, insomnia... those are just the ones I feel okay about mentioning in this blog. There's a whole host of others! I won't tell you all the symptoms I have personally experienced already, but suffice to say there have been enough of them to make me feel a bit relieved at this point to know that there's a reason for what I've been living with for months and wondering what the heck my body was doing to me!

Wanna join my club?

Happiness is...

Happiness is finding a long, lost friend and picking up where you left off. Yesterday I reconnected with my long, lost friend Heather. We met as neighbors when we both lived in VA in 1996. In a very short span of time we became fast friends and as close as sisters. She was the last person I hugged, the person I waved good-bye to, as I began the long drive back to Milwaukee after my marriage broke up. In six short months of friendship we had been through so much together. I believe God put her in my life to give me strength. She says I was the strong one. After I moved we managed to stay connected via phone calls and e-mail for awhile but then, between moves, name changes and life changes, we lost each other. On Friday night I finally found the breakthrough I needed and yesterday we talked on the phone for the first time in about ten years! With tears and laughter we caught up on each other's life - kids, marriages, jobs, moves, homes and just about everything else we could think of that happened since the last time we talked. We peeled away ten years of living like it was 10 minutes. We both said we had thought about each other often and missed each other. Although we're about ten hours apart by car, we're hoping to get together sometime soon. I am so happy that we've reconnected!

I agree...

I'm really not political... honestly... but I did watch the President's State of the Union address the other night. I watched mostly because it was on right after Biggest Loser and because there wasn't really anything else on at that time that I wanted to see. He said something that resonated with me (see my 2010 blog "I'm just sayin...") and I wanted to mention it here. He said we should celebrate the winners of the science fair like we celebrate the winners of the Super Bowl (paraphrase) and I just want to say that I agree that we (myself included) have placed a high priority on the sports entertainment industry, and entertainment in general, to the exclusion of more important things like education, poverty, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to sit here and spout off some idealistic rhetoric as if I'm not going to watch the Super Bowl next weekend; I'm just suggesting that we should be mindful of how we prioritize life and be sure to keep sports in proper perspective.

Lose Yourself

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
to seize everything you ever wanted - One moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip? [Eminem, Lose Yourself, 2002]

Believe it or not, this song (clean version) is the first track on the workout playlist on my iPod. I probably don't seem like the typical Eminem fan... overweight, farsighted, 46 year old woman... and I guess I'm not really a fan of pottymouth rapper boy BUT this song never fails to morph me into a workout maniac no matter how crappy I feel when I get to the gym. I mean, if the song is true and the movie that this song is from (8-mile which I did not see) documents the truth of his journey from mobile home park to stardom, then I guess he has something that I'd like for myself... guts, courage, persistence, dedication, motivation, fight, perseverence.

But for now, I'm going to take a couple of ibuprofen and curl up with a good heating pad.

On burning one's journals

This morning on the bus on my way to work I mused about writing, as I often do, and I was suddenly struck with a memory of the night, about five years ago, that I burned (shredded actually) every single diary and journal I had written in my youth. (!!!!) This does seem a bit shocking in retrospect, especially because what I was musing about on the bus was a question of whether I might, at some point in my future, write my memoir or at least a semi-autobiographical work of fiction at which time I would find myself regretting having shredded my personal written history. I asked myself, "Will I remember what I need to remember if I ever need to remember it?" To which I immediately answered, "Probably not and thank the dear Lord for that!"

I recall the journal-shredding evening quite clearly. It wasn't pretty. I remember being very, very depressed. Over what I don't recall but it must have had something to do with or been somehow related to my past. I pulled out the lockbox that contained all those diaries and journals, sat down on the floor, and read them, page by page, book by book. I remember loathing - no that's not too strong a word for it - the person who wrote all those words. How it drove me crazy to read that every single boy I met made me act stupid (writing my first name with his last name) and every argument with my parents made me feel helpless (I could never win). The shame and embarrassment of being a member of Weight Watchers at the age of 13 - back when I still had hope that one day I'd be thin. The pain and heartache of girlfriends who invited everyone but me.

As I progressed through the journals the immaturity left but the painful memories didn't. Heartbreak, arguments, weight problems, dysfuntional relationships, they were all there in my somewhat more matured life, and I still couldn't stand the person that wrote about them. Furthermore, every mistake, every embarrassment, every sin, was there on those pages for anyone to read if they ever got into that lockbox. That was certainly not anything I wanted my children to see someday! Oh dear what a frightening thought.

No, I don't regret shredding all that history. The way I see it, if I ever do write my memoirs or even a semi-autobiographical work of fiction, and they actually do get published, I plan to take some literary license and make them sound a whole lot better than they actually were!