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SCOOTER4263's Recent Blog Entries
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Thursday, April 15, 2010
Not from SP, or even healthy eating and exercising (although I may limit it to a walk.) I'm tired. My body is sore - even though I was a professional gardener for lots of years, the day after the first major gardening day of the year is always painful. I got enough sleep, though, and I'm not paralytically sore - as I have been upon occasion - so I suspect it's more of a generalized tiredness.
I'm tired of responsibility, of knowing that my husband's health, let alone my own, is pretty much in my hands. Tired of the sea of boxes, trunks and bags that contain everything my mother (and therefore a few more generations of forebears) had in her house, that were picked up and dropped in my (already fairly full) house and barn. Tired of knowing that as fast as I clean up one area, another previously tidied one has succumbed to household entropy and has to be tackled anew. Very tired of not being able to find anything or sit without moving a stack of something-or-other first.
And The Men are here again. Dave and PeeWee. They are, with various other assorted characters, our go-to guys for any sort of construction, repair, and general labor. We feed them lunch, pay them very little (by my standards anyway), listen to their tales of woe and generally nudge them along. The progress that The Men make on a job tends to be slow, but these days it's positively glacial because they're both having Personal Issues. Dave is contemplating quitting his pack-a-day cigarette, 18 pack-a-day beer and occasional Other habit, and PeeWee's wife (he's 38 or 40, Marci is 60... he's been with her, on and off, since he was fifteen *cough*) is facing some serious health problems.
Sure, it would probably be easier to hire the sort of professional workers you find licensed, in the phonebook, with professional references, but we like these guys. They've become a sort of extended family, and I know that if we had any sort of problem whatsoever, they'd drop everything and be here in a heartbeat, and would handle the problem somehow. We'd never freeze or starve or die because we didn't have a ride someplace (if they had to hotwire a car - or a snowmobile - they'd get to us somehow.) They're my boys and I love them.
Still.... I'm currently a little tired of The Men and their Issues.
For anyone who wondered, incidentally, what kind of accountant couldn't handle complicated tax issues, the answer is: skillful, popular ones. It isn't that Ray doesn't know how to do these things, it's that it was going to take longer than my alloted time - my fault entirely, for putting off my taxes until the last minute. I suppose he would have pulled them together if I'd insisted, but he's not only our accountant, he's our friend, and I didn't want to do that to him (or pay him what it would have cost for an all-night "emergency tax prep".)
So I'm going to take a day off. Im going to read (fiction! wow! not even useful stuff!) and play with my SoulCollage card(s) and generally putter about - I'll even put something in the slow cooker for dinner so I don't have to fuss with that (Paula, it's going to be the lentil/cabbage thing.)
Right now I have to make a run to the pharmacy, but the minute I get back, I'm hanging out my Gone Fishing sign.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Here's the story: I *have to* get the tax stuff together, and between being a small business owner plus having an out of state rental property, taxes tend to get pretty complicated (and I refuse to pay Ray, the accountant, to sort stuff I can sort perfectly well on my own.) I usually have all this done in February, but this year, well, between playing here with you guys, doing some new art, working on the book and in general putzing around instead of taking care of business, well... here we are in April.
It's spring: which means, as a grower, I have to be sure I'm up to date with all the organic details and have all the equipment ready to go. Also have to decide what we're growing, and when and to whom we'll be selling, and start getting it together. Shouldn't all that have been done already as well? You better believe it should.
Last but certainly not least, I have a couple SoulCollage cards I've been working at, and I want to get them finished, probably in the evenings before I fall over.
All this means that the book gets shelved (ha! I made a funny!) for the time being - I can work on it in my head as I do outside grunt work, but anything more than that is out for now. And it also means that I'm going to have to cut back on my SparkPeople hours (and I do mean hours) if I'm going to have any time left over for little details like eating and sleeping.
The good news is that I always get plenty of exercise in the spring, and with today's resolve to take better care of myself, I hope to see that weight ticker start to move in the correct direction.
I'll think of you all fondly and check in when I get a minute - and if you see me here too often, chase me off! I am SO BAD with the whole self-discipline thing!   
(Why the groundhog? I dunno - I just liked him!)
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Everyone's favorite Cool Hand Luke quote is always the "failure to communicate" one, and that's good,too, but this is my favorite:
Captain: You run one time, you got yourself a set of chains. You run twice you got yourself two sets. You ain't gonna need no third set, 'cause you gonna get your mind right.
That's my favorite because it seems like I always have to take at least two or three cracks at something before I can do it, carrying an extra set of chains each time, and it's the same here with the weight loss thing.
I guess I really wasn't ready to admit that it was going to be difficult - after all, until the last couple years, I really didn't have much of a weight problem. I'd gain a few, cut back, lose them and forget it, always hovering around the 150 mark, plus or minus ten. (I got down to 133 once with Nutrisystem, after baby #2, but it was too difficult to maintain.)
So I lied to you guys - and to myself - that I was making progress here. I lost ten pounds, then regained two, lost three, regained another two, lost one, gained one, lost three etcetcetc. I never bothered to update my weight ticker because it really wasn't going anywhere.
And neither was I.
The fact is that I'm having a real time of it, draggin' my you-know-what out of bed every morning, planning healthy meals, and cutting out the alcohol. I don't have a drinking problem, but I do have a *habit* problem. I habitually take a nap I don't need in the midmorning, take a cocktail I don't need in the late afternoon and often a brandy at bedtime, eat things I surely don't need just because I make them for my husband.
And whilst doing all those things I don't need, I ignore the ones I do, like the twice-daily meditation I used to do, the long dog walks, the yoga that started every morning, and the million and one little habits that used to keep my weight in check - stairs instead of elevators, yogurt instead of mayo, black coffees instead of two-and-twos.
Sure, I've got plenty of excuses. Maybe even a few good ones that I delude myself into believing are actually "reasons", rather than "excuses", like the injured foot that keeps me from walking the dogs the way I used to (but have I called the orthopedic guy? What do you think?) and the boatloads of stress (like everyone doesn't have stress, right?)
I'm trying to avoid the temptation to just get up tomorrow morning and be someone else entirely - I can do that, sure, for a while anyway, but it doesn't *solve* anything. And I'm awfully damn tired of slapping band-aids on problems.
So it's time. I've got a diet plan (South Beach, recommended for my husband's non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, but good for me too), an exercise plan (a Y membership I've almost never used, a bunch of DVDs, two dogs to exercise and a farm to walk them on, a stretchy thing with handles, and a huge ball that I believe I sit on... and probably other stuff I've forgotten about) and all the support a body could possibly want right here on SP.
Yep. Time to get my mind right.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
My daughter's developmental cell teacher found this little gem:
http://www.peepresearch.org/surgery.html
Funny stuff, especially for the scientifically minded! 
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
White crocus...I forget which one - probably Jeanne d'Arc
And this is a dwarf iris (Iris reticulata 'Pixie')
The afternoon sun melted the morning snow off, and these guys were out when I went outside to get the mail. For those of you in sunnier places (which, frankly, is just about anywhere) a few flowers are nothing new, but here in Central New York, where we usually have a couple feet of snow on the ground now, this is pretty fancy stuff.
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