Sick, Again

Well, it’s been almost a month since the last time.  That’s good, yeah?  *sigh*
E.’s hours finally seem to be getting back to normal and I’m home sick today.

*shakes fist at universe*

I’m not even going to bother with all my normal whining, I just wanted to update for people in case you don’t hear from me today.

Howdy

Still kinda mopey on this end, though doing a little better.  Saturday night I watched Death at a Funeral with S….I had seen it before, but oh my lordy does that movie make me crack up out loud. 
Yesterday I was a bit more motivated and got some things done around the house…though only a fraction of what needed to be done, really.  I hit the gym despite a multitude of quiet grumblings to myself about  not wanting to go.  I was fighting off a cold, but thanks to oodles of Zicam it’s not really become a full blown thing.   I was still coughing and tired though and this morning my throat hurt and now my voice is starting to go.  So, I guess when I wanted to rest instead of going to the gym I wasn’t being totally lazy.  Still, I got a weight workout in on a Sunday so I’m ahead of the game for the week! I’m hoping I’ll feel like a quick run after work today.  I don’t feel rotten at all, just very obviously fighting something of the viral variety.
Oh, and my behind is doing better too.  I sort of thought my post on Friday was just a funny anecdote–I wasn’t terribly upset about it.  But thanks for your well wishes nonetheless. 
Blah blah, boring boring, whine whine.  Yay, Monday.

ETA:  Need a smile?  Buckets of babies!

Sad Day

I’m having a sad day.  A couple times this week I started an entry but didn’t finish it or pulled it because I didn’t think anyone wanted to read more of my self-pitying drivel.  But the reality is I’m sad today, and it’s been brewing all week.  And I need to be okay with feeling sad because otherwise it won’t pass.
A few reasons why I am having a sad day:

• As Tori knows and can relate to, I can’t just turn my feelings off when other people are sad and crying.  I really wish I could.  So this week’s events and the tears in my own department (plus being called on to comfort a co-worker) kind of left me emotionally spent.
• Additionally, E. working these regular 15 hour days & weekends made me feel sad.  I mean, yeah, of course I am sad not to see him.  But again because I’m me I spent emotional energy feeling so sad and bad for him.  The good news is some fixes have been put into place and E. is feeling optimistic today, which in turn makes me feel a bit hopeful.
• And in general seeing so many people working these ridiculous hours that cut so deeply into one’s personal life (one of E.’s co-workers actually didn’t see his son for an entire week because the little guy was in bed before he got home every night) makes me sad, sad, sad.  This bullcrap about how happy we should be to simply be working is just that.  Losing so much of your life because you have no job is not much worse than losing so much of your life because you do have a job.
• I feel like I have alienated and possibly lost some friends lately because I have been moody and flakey because of what’s going on with me at work and what’s going on with E. at work.   I can’t fix this without being a liar or dishonest with myself so I just have to accept that such things are going to happen.   Which reminds me that I need to reach out to my friend A. this week, because I’ve got the time and hopefully she does too.
• I continue having an existential crisis over whether I should just ride out my current job, which is more good than bad and just a bit more of the bad recently because of circumstance, or go try to find a job that I may not love just to take something that I know isn’t being dissolved while I wait for things to turn enough that I can do what I really want to do.
• Do I even have to mention the weather here is totally not helping??

I’m spending some time tonight with S. watching movies which will hopefully cheer me up, and above all else, I feel like I just need to ride out the sad right now and maybe be okay with feeling that.   This too shall pass.   Likely by end of day tomorrow–that’s how these things go sometimes.
On a happier note, I only missed one (weight) workout this week and that was because I was so tired on Thursday night that I actually felt sick to my stomach.  It worked out because E. was able to come over for a wee bit after work.  There is a point where you have to push yourself, and another point where you really listen when your body is telling you to rest, and I think I made the right choice.

Reason #57 I Want My Own Washer and Dryer

As I’ve mentioned here a few times I think, I have super sensitive skin.  I’m allergic to almost anything made by Proctor & Gamble (including both Tide and Febreeze), most metals (except pure silver and pure gold), and fabrics made from most animal fibers (cashmere, angora, wool–but not alpaca!).  I have to be really, really careful about what kind of detergents, shampoos, cosmetics, and most eyeshadows I use and I absolutely can’t use fabric softener or dryer sheets.
Yesterday something felt…a little off most of the day about my underwear.  I figured it was that they didn’t fit quite right or didn’t work well with the pants I was wearing or something.  By the time I got home…well, I’ll just lay it out for you.  My behind itched really badly.  By bedtime, I had little red welts forming on my bottom.   This morning, I had a full blown rash down the middle of my butt.  Yikes! Also, ew!
I haven’t taken any baths recently or changed any of my soaps or detergents, but then I remembered…last time I did my laundry, I found a dryer sheet in the washer when I was removing my clothes that I overlooked when loading.
Yeah, that was not a typo.  There was a dryer sheet in the WASHER.  Not the dryer.  I am usually pretty good about checking the dryers.  I wasn’t expecting to check the washer for a dryer sheet.
Instinctively I want to get mad at people for leaving their dryer sheets in the dryer (or washer in this case), but I know the average person is not really aware that people like me exist–so sensitive that even a used dryer sheet can cause an allergic reaction.    I mean, it’s still lazy and annoying but not really an offense worth getting all bent out of shape about.  I just really, really wish I had my own washer & dryer so I could monitor the contamination of my laundry a bit better. 
I wonder if I could write the cost of my own washer & dryer off as a medical expense?  Now, if only I had someplace to put them…
Meanwhile, I am probably going to seem particularly fidgety today as I scoot around in my chair to relieve some of my discomfort. :p

Some Bad, Some Good

First of all–apparently everyone already knew that TJ Maxx is a craphole.  I must have had it mixed up in my head with Marshall’s.  Really, I don’t remember it always being so awful. Well, now I know.
Today was a pretty icky day at work.  The whole week has been stressful in bizarre ways I won’t enumerate and I’m dreading the coming months through…oh, about June or July (per usual, assuming I am still there), but today there were many tears.  Most of the tears were due to the fact it was the last day for the people in the portion of our company that was sold off and that was pretty rotten.  If you’ve never had the chance to work in an environment where mass layoffs are occurring, I don’t recommend it.  And for unrelated reasons there were a lot of tears in my department.  Well, maybe not unrelated.  I think nerves were just raw and people have been working a lot of hours and emotions bubbled to the surface pretty easily.  I haven’t seen someone cry at work since my last job (okay, in fairness I DID work from home for a pretty long time so that helped).  Yeah, you know what?  Today kinda sucked.
But I came home and had a GOOD run on the dreadmill (and then watched a particularly good episode of LOST, imo).  So far this week I’ve hit all my exercise goals and frankly, that’s been hard enough.  If I make it through Saturday and nail all weight training and cardio, I owe myself a gold star-ish reward, I think.  I’ve just stripped down my workouts and my training goals to the very basics–back to where I started.  (plus yoga)  Just trying to make my eating habits clean and my exercise habits consistent.   It feels good.  It feels good that it’s so simple, and it feels good right now to have something simple to accomplish.  It actually feels good to have no major goal other than doing what I did in the very beginning*, consistently, and with focus.
I hope I sleep better tonight.  I know I keep saying that, too.  Blah.

*Ugh, now I have the intro part of “Doe a Deer” stuck in my head…let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…la la la…

My Contribution to the Ecomony*

I had an appointment to get my hair cut this evening, and I’ve been meaning to do some spring clothes shopping, so I decided to go after work and before the haircut.  It made sense since I work so close to so much downtown shopping.
Up until now I had been avoiding buying new spring work clothes with everything being so uncertain.  But I can’t keep recycling the same three tops for much longer.  So I decided to hit the bargain stores.
TJ Maxx was a huge, gross disappointment.  Seriously, I don’t know about TJ Maxx in other areas (actually I should–I’ve been to a couple in the ‘burbs but don’t remember much about the experience) but this one was a pit.  The store itself was not terribly nice, the selection stunk, and I think the attendant to the dressing room might have been on drugs.  Or possibly had a frontal lobotomy.  Either way.  The service in general was atrocious–I went on a wild goosechase with another customer trying to find someone, ANYONE to help us find the women’s dressing room.  And when we finally did, it was back in a kind of sketchy area of the store.  Hmph.  I am going to pretend they are in the process of remodeling to make myself feel better.
The checkout line was a disaster, because they had two lines stemming out of the same central area–one for returns and one for purchases.  But it wasn’t really clear which was which until I found myself behind one person in the return line.  Argh.  I had only found one shirt I liked anyway, and I was too frustrated at this point to bother going around and waiting again in the other line.  I threw the shirt on a rack and headed down to Filene’s basement.
Ahhh!! Pure shopping bliss!  The clerks were cheerful and helpful and I went into the (nicely maintained, well supervised) dressing room with 8 different tops.  I decided on two, at $9.97 a piece, plus some trouser socks.  The ONE shirt I wanted at TJ Maxx was $16.99, so in addition to having an all-around better shopping experience, I actually got a better deal.  I was *briefly* tempted to go back to TJ Maxx tomrrow at lunch to get the one shirt I wanted because it was awfully cute, but I am so disgusted with that particular store that it’s totally not worth it to me.
It’s a good thing I had a hair appointment because I could have spent much longer in Filene’s and probably left with a lot more stuff that maybe I didn’t necessarily need but couldn’t resist.
After my haircut, I did my yoga for the week.  I’m drinking some decaf peppermint green tea and hoping to have a nice night of sleep.**

*This is from Idiocracy, and I can’t say the word the normal way ever since I saw that movie.

**Last night I woke up at 12:30am fussy and fidgety and anxious.  I took a Benedryl to knock me back out and then slept through my alarm and woke up at 8am.  OOPS. (but still made it to work by 8:45–THANK YOU CTA for actually operating in my favor today!)

Last Night’s Gym Experience

I had a funny thing happen at the gym last night.  Incidentally, I had a GREAT workout with E., who ACTUALLY GOT TO LEAVE WORK AT A NORMAL HOUR.  I can’t tell you how exciting that was for both of us.
My shoulder has been a little bit tweaky since the water park, but it seemed to be getting better instead of worse, and ice packs seemed to help it out a bit more.  So I was cautious about working out and which exercises I did–I’m a little tender this morning, but not enough that I feel I need to rest it more or see the doc or anything.  That’s a relief–of course Dr. Google had me all freaked out that I needed rotator cuff surgery. :p  Oh, and my butt hurts like the dickens from lunges and the hamstring machine.  What I skimped on in upper body, I made up for in lower body.  Hee.
Anyway, I was over at the “girl” section of the free weights (i.e., those that only go up to 20 lbs, which is where you usually find the women, vs. the BIG weight room that goes into astronomical poundage where the boys grunt and stink and sweat and hang out.  I have been seen in the boy section, and am ready to go back to hitting it pretty soon, as 20 lbs is getting easier again.)   and was privy to a couple having an argument.  Let me set the scene:  I was doing curls and stuff with 20 lb weights, the guy of the couple was doing the same as me, and the girl was using 7 lb weights.  A tiff ensues, the girl gets very fussy and defensive, and from what I can figure out she was mad because he was trying to get her to use heavier weights.  She exclaims “I want to be toned, not buff!!”, tosses down the weights, and stomps away.
Well the first thing that made me laugh is that clearly E. and I are not the only couple to fuss at each other at the gym sometimes.  (ahem, Kyra)
The second thing that made me laugh is that all arguments about women and weight training aside*, I was lifting the same amount as her guy was, and if you have met me in person, I am most assuredly NOT buff.  Heck, right now I am barely even toned.  But certainly not buff and bulky.  So I am trying to figure out how this made sense in her mind…that I was right there next to the two of them with 20 lb dumbbells and my generally average body, and yet she was refusing to bump up past 7lbs because she was scared of getting too bulky.  For some reason, the absurdity of this was really, really funny to me.  It made me temporarily feel like some giant weight lifting monster, which is laughable on so many levels.

*A lot of women worry that weight training will make them look like a guy, and there are articles upon articles explaining why this is just not true.  I never really had that fear, I just was brainwashed to believe a woman could never really BE that strong.  Well dang, I sure learned otherwise quickly.

Focus

Earlier in the year, I set some goals up for myself and put them into a nifty spreadsheet that I held myself accountable to every day.  Then I got all focused on the PHR exam (and passed, yay!) and sort of let other things slide.  Then I found out my job would be going away at…some point this year…I guess (things remain completely up in the air and uncertain and last week I actually worked a couple of really long days so I am clueless, truly) …and had a little freakout and let other things slide as I looked for work and reached out to my networking contacts like a crazy woman.  And of course, like everyone else it would seem, I got sick a few times which knocked me off my game.
Well, here I am.  Employed, healthy (KNOCK WOOD), and with PHR exam passed.  Isn’t it about time to get back on those goals?
The answer is, of course, yes.  But more than the obvious reasons, the uncertainty at work is really messing with my head.  I would never say this in an interview, but I do not do well with a lack of concrete answers.   I’ve always liked my ducks in a row…though I’ve loosened up a lot on letting my ducks wander.  I can be extremely flexible to a point, and I think I’ve passed that point, because I feel it wearing on me.  I need to anchor myself to SOMETHING, to have something to focus on and make sense of.  And right now, I feel like refocusing on my goals will give me that anchor.
So.  Starting this week, I am recommitting to my old exercise plan.  Weight training x3, cardio x2, and just to break myself out of a rut, I am going to try hitting the elliptical or the pool once in awhile for the cardio stuff.  I’m adding yoga x1 because I love it and I need it and I would also like to get E. up to speed on it so we can do it together.  
I am contemplating doing a half marathon with my trainer at the end of the year.  If money was more certain, this would be a no-brainer.  But right now, I need to weigh the cost carefully and see just how cheaply I can get a flight for November or December. :p
I’m sticking with 2 servings of veggies a day.  I’m knocking back the creative stuff for now and slipping in job-search related activities. 
And I apologize in advance, but social activities* will continue to take a little bit more of a back seat.  (not COMPLETELY, I just need to take care of me first, m’kay?)

*Speaking of social events, thanks to Kim & Chef Steven for hosting a very nice get together this weekend, where I finally got to meet the lovely Miss Tori (who is truly lovely, inside and out!)!  And spend some time again with Mr. Kapgar and his charming wife Katie.  A good time was had by all!

Pardon Me While I Gloat for a Sec

I had some little reminders the past week about how far I’ve come, physically, in a year.  These little reminders…in the big picture?  Make my horrible running abilities seem pretty minor.
Yesterday I wanted to do yoga very badly.  I felt like my run Tuesday might have been so rough because I spent a couple days cramped up in a car.  My body just felt like it needed a major stretch-out.  So, after arriving home from work at about 8pm (don’t even ask), I actually OPTED TO SKIP LOST in favor of doing yoga.  Unheard of!
It felt nice and all, but I realized my old standby yoga DVD is way too easy now.  I was stretched, but I didn’t have that good soreness I used to get after yoga…except for a wee bit in my abs.  Holy cow, for the first time since I ever did yoga (back in about 2000, I think) it’s time for an upgrade* because I am that much stronger.  In the words of Keanu Reeves, “Whoa.”
Over the weekend, at the water park, it struck me that one year ago I was just starting this amazing journey.  I had just hired a personal trainer, and was overhauling my whole menu.  I’d survived the hell of super-carbo-detox. (ugh, that was miserable!**) I died inside while E. ate a funnel cake…whereas this year, I knew if I ate a funnel cake I’d just be all grouchy and tired all afternoon.  I loaded my all-you-can-eat buffet plate with crab legs (fairly healthy, still–aside from the drawn butter) and veggies because I actually WANTED veggies.  (okay, I had pie, but it was a major cheat night, dammit!)
And despite the fact I am not at all as toned as I would like to be right now, and not as toned as I’ve achieved at other points in the past year, I still have only one swimsuit to wear because all the ones from last year are too big.  When I went to the doc a few weeks ago, my weight was EXACTLY the same TO THE POUND as it was in November.  Yahoo!
I needed these reminders and pride points so badly this week, so please excuse me for gloating a little.  It’s a reminder to myself of what I’ve done, and that once upon a time I started all of this clueless and seeking answers that just might have changed my life forever.

*I’d just like to do a shameless birthday plug and note that  I added the Bryan Kest Power Yoga DVD series to my Amazon wishlist, which kicked my ass for many years on video tape, and my birthday is less than a month away.  *ahem*
**If there is one thing that keeps me from gorging on white bread, white rice, most crackers, and most pastas in my darkest hours, it’s the thought of going off all that stuff again and how absolutely horrible I felt while under “detox”.

The Reverse Rant

Taking a cue from Nilsa, I decided to try my hand at a little reversal to the standard blog rant.  That is, in light of going off on something that pissed me off yesterday, I am going to write out the things *I* do that probably surely irritate others.

1.  I am always that person chatting on the phone on the train or in the store.  I like to multitask, and usually those are times when I’m not distracted doing other things and have the time to sit and listen and chit chat.   And I am sure I don’t do it quietly, as I am almost incapable of talking quietly.

2.  In a similar vein, I have ranted and raved that CTA and Metra should charge people for bags like the airlines do, because no one should be carrying a large enough combination of bags that an entire person could fit in the space being occupied by coats and bags.  However, I frequently carry a big old gym bag and overstuffed purse on the train and am totally in violation of my own “rule.”

3.  Yes, I am the person who used up all the hot water.

4.  I drive slowly and over-cautiously.  There are a couple reasons for that.  One is that I didn’t drive for over three years in Chicago because I let my license expire and I’m still kinda getting used to driving again after so long.  The other is that I was in two car accidents when I still lived in Ohio, one of which involved me getting sideswiped by a Winnebago on a 4-lane highway and slammed into a concrete median. Luckily, I escaped with only some pulled muscles and back pain.  Still, I am an extremely nervous person on the road and it shows.  I try to drive as little as possible, or only on side streets when I can.

5.  Both E. and H. can attest to the fact that I somehow manage to consistently cause the self-checkout kiosk to implode.  And it’s not even a user-error issue, I just seem to carry some weird magnetic field.  It’s rare that I use the self-checkout and a manager on duty doesn’t have to come by at least twice to fix it.

For the record, my good deed today was totally foiled.  I had a friend in college who liked to leave extra change in the coin return slot of vending machines, or pump a little into the vending machine toward the next customer’s snack.  He said he figured it put a happy little surprise in someone’s day and that seemed like a good thing to do.  I always liked his technique, so I tried leaving 50 cents (the price of pop in our office) in the vending machine.  Alas, someone else was in the kitchen and thought he was helpfully alerting me that I forgot my change.  I guess I could have tried to explain to him what I was doing…hm, maybe tomorrow.  There’s no statute of limitations on good deeds, right?