Reconciliation?

How could these two people ever be friends?

Person A	Person 1
Female	Female
Liberal, Gay Marriage, Social Justice Christian	Fundamentalist Christian
Democrat	Republican
NPR listener	Fox News watcher
PC computer user	Apple computer person
Flexible planner	Routine maker
Home is functional but never spotless	House is spotless at all times
Multiple pet owner	Dislikes pets – they are messy
Rarely wears makeup	Always wears makeup
Occasionally gets manicures	Nails always done
Thinks some tattoos are tasteful	Thinks all tattoos are shameful
Loves Person @	Loves Person @

And that last line is the problem. Person @ is in the middle of these two people, with loyalties torn. If it weren't for Person @, Person A and Person 1 would never need to have anything to do with one another. 

Any ideas?

Saturday Adventures!

I had a little adventure yesterday morning.

I got up, got my coffee and breakfast, got the laundry started, got dressed, and headed out to the Farmer's Market. My main agenda was to get some meat from the pasture-raised beef people. They are not at our FM every week, so it was important to get there. After the FM, I was going to go to my church knitting group (I started a small project 18 months ago and still haven't finished it!), and then in the afternoon a friend or two were coming over to start some lactoferments.

Occasionally when we put the key into our car's ignition, it just spins, and doesn't "catch" to crank the engine. This is usually fixed by taking the key out, turning it over, reinserting it, and trying again. Yesterday I put the key in, it spun a bit, but then it caught. It was unusual for it to do that, but the car started just fine, and off I went. I was listening to Car Talk as I drove, and when I got to the FM, I stopped the car, but left it running while I put up the window shade (heat index 104 yesterday!), got my cash in my pocket, stowed my purse, and listened to the tail end of Car Talk.

The program ended, and I went to turn off the car, and the key would. not. budge. In either direction! Wait, that's not true, it wouldn't turn. It would move - it easily pulled right out of the ignition!

There I sat, engine running, key in hand - going, "Um, this is NOT good!"

I was pretty close to our mechanic's shop, and I've been using them long enough to know that they are usually there on Saturday mornings, but being officially "closed", they won't answer the telephone. So, I took down the sun shade, put my seatbelt back on, and drove away to the shop. Thankfully, they were in. The mechanic worked on it, but was also unable to get it to turn off, so he drove it into a bay, and disconnected the battery cable. But of course, once the car is running, it's not running off the battery, so it didn't kill the engine. He finally got it to stop by pulling the fuse to the fuel pump, and it petered out. We were all laughing and shaking our heads.

I called The Daughter to come and get me, which she very kindly did, and we went off back to the Farmer's Market and the natural food store, and back to my house. Thank goodness we recently had our truck fixed up, air conditioning and all!

Needless to say, I didn't make it to the knitting group. Which is really too bad, as I'd hoped to *finally* finish the small project in time for the intended recipient's birthday on Wednesday!

However, my friend Justin did come over as planned, and we started 4 quarts/flavors of kombucha, 4 pint jars of pickle spears, and 3 jars of sauerkraut! I also made some cabbage sauteed with bacon and onions.YUM. And managed to feed us a spot of lunch AND dinner in there, and of course cleaned up & got the dishwasher running. I was exhausted and my feet were killing me when we were done, but so happy to get all that done! It's so much more fun cooking with someone else. Justin and I seem to collaborate well, so that was fun. Maybe Justin is used to that, since he works in commercial kitchens. Husband and I cook together all the time - but usually not working on the same recipe. For example, he grills the steaks and I fix the vegetables, or something like that. So working with someone else on the same recipe was a different sort of adventure!

Why I decided to write this post before showering and getting dressed to go to church, I can't tell you (Procrastination Queen, that's me!), but if I don't get that done NOW I'm going to miss church, and that's just not an option! See y'all!

Happy New Year 2010!

Yesterday was Epiphany, which means that Christmas is officially over. That makes today my New Year's Day! Today we will take down the Christmas decorations, and start back on The McCombs Plan. Actually, it may take us a couple more days to fully rejoin the plan, as we have a lot of dairy in the fridge to use up yet. I am so looking forward to feeling great again! I had so much energy when we were on the plan before, and while I'm not as draggy as I was before it, after all the holiday food, I'm definitely not where I want to be.

Last night at the Epiphany service, Father John had a table with a nativity scene and candles in front of the altar. He told us that he would serve communion off to the side, so that each of us could stop by the Nativity on our way to take communion. He suggested that we study the baby Jesus, and think about what we have to offer him in this new year. I got to thinking about that, and realized that I don't know what I have to offer this year, to church, personally, or professionally. So my prayer as I reached the altar/nativity was to figure out what I will do with 2010.

I'm not really teaching Pilates anymore, although I have had a few requests to teach a class, perhaps at the church. I'm doing my voiceover work, but that's 30 minutes a day, every three weeks. I've thought about getting a job of any sort, but that would hinder our ability to up & travel, which we like to do fairly often.

I really enjoyed what I did through the holidays: I made lists and did a lot of cooking, taking photographs and writing about each recipe as I made it. Everybody seemed so amazed that I made everything myself. Sad, really! And they were only standard recipes, like bread made with yeast & all purpose flour, not even soaked or sprouted or anything.

I'm getting more and more into trying to eat a more "traditional" diet, experiencing and reading about all the health benefits of doing so. I don't feel like I'm advanced enough in that to really start a blog about it yet, though, a la Nourishing Gourmet or Cheeseslave. I will probably blog about it here anyway, as it helps me clarify my thinking to write about it. And maybe someone will find my own babysteps in that direction instructive.

Cooking and photographing and blogging may be fun for me, but I will also need something that gets me out of the house and with people on a regular basis. Husband travels for a living, and is gone for anywhere from 3 to 10 days at a time. I'm WAY too extraverted to just be at home with the dogs for days on end.

In that vein: as I do seem to be something of a hausfrau these days, one of my resolutions is to be a better one. When Husband is home, we like to just enjoy each other's company, so I try to do the cleaning and organizing while he's gone. I'm going to work on being better at doing the FlyLady system. It really helps me to stay on top of things. Interestingly, it's quite similar to a system I worked out on my own a couple of different times in my life when I was very organized!

Also on the personal improvement side of things, I want to get back into going to yoga and ballet classes to work on my balance and flexibility. There are adult yoga & ballet classes very close to my house, almost walking distance, so it's completely ridiculous that I haven't been going. I also got my bicycle fixed up about a year ago, then never got on it. After my knee surgery, I begged and begged to be allowed to ride it, and still haven't. *Sigh*. So that's another thing I could work on. Heck, I could ride the bike to the yoga classes...

As far as professionally, I could work on getting together a voice resume to try to do more voiceover work, which I quite enjoy.

I love to sing. I was working on getting together a cabaret act, but my accompanist is in Chicago, which makes that pretty hard to do! I would like to get back into voice lessons to improve my singing; breath control in particular. For that matter I would like to take some acting lessons. I don't think I've ever had an actual acting lesson in my life, and I do love doing community theatre. There are a couple of shows coming up later this spring that I'll audition for, so that will be fun.

Husband just reminded me that I've always wanted to take sign language lessons, so that is something else to look into. I've always felt that sign language combines two of my biggest interests: language, and movement.

My friend Cynthia did some aptitude testing last year - I might consider going to the Johnson-O'Connor Research Foundation and do that, too. It was quite interesting to hear her talk about it. What brought it up was I was playing a word game that I'm insanely good at, and I thought, okay, what real world job would use this skill?" I mentioned it to her, and she told me of this testing she did that shows that sort of thing. It's very different from the interest and personality inventories I did years ago in "career counseling". This tests your actual native skills and suggests what career would use those skills.

Ack. Toxic Option Overload. This is the problem! So many things to choose from. Just have to figure out which things are priority, sort the logistics, and get on with it!

Happy New Year 2010!

The McCombs Plan

So today (Tuesday, 8/18/09) is Day Six of a sixteen week Plan that Husband and I have embarked upon: The McCombs Plan. The photo is of the supplements (just for ME) that the plan uses. With Husband's schedule, he's just following the eating part of the plan as best he can, the supplements would be impossible for him to keep up with.

The Plan has four elements: 1. Supplements, 2. Drink Water, 3. Sweat, 4. Eating Plan.

The goal of the plan is to kill off fungal candida overgrowth, re-establish proper intestinal flora balance, and discover and eliminate what foods you are sensitive to. We all have candida, it's part of the normal intestinal flora, but with our modern diet and overuse or misuse of antibiotics, it grows out of control, causing a multitude of problems.

1. The supplements help to kill fungal candida, flush it out of the body, and re-establish proper flora. You take a detox supplement for the entire 16 weeks. This is primarily megadoses of Vitamin C, along with some other immune boosting herbs like echinacea. You take a candida-killing supplement for the first 8 weeks. After 6 weeks you add in an acidophilus supplement. There is no point to adding the probiotics before then, as the candida is too strong still and will overpower it.

2. Drinking water (1 quart per 50lbs of body weight) also helps to flush it out. We all know this is good for us. I actually already drank about this much water every day, so it's just a matter of accounting for me.

3. Sweating also helps to flush the toxins (that you are killing off) out of your body. You are to do this 6 times a week. This, to me, is the strangest part of the plan. I mean, it makes perfect sense once you read the explanation, but when I first heard about it, I wondered what on earth it was about. You see, exercise sweating doesn't count, it has to be in a bathtub or sauna. Hunh? More about this in a minute.

4. The eating plan limits what the candida feeds on, and as it's also an elimination diet, it helps you figure out what YOU react to. The first 8 weeks are the most restrictive, but it's *quite* a reasonable diet. You may eat: All meats except pork. All vegetables, including starchy ones. All fruits except oranges. Eggs. Brown rice (any form). Coffee, Tea. Olive oil. Coconut oil. (If you are not hip to coconut oil, read up on it, it's a remarkably health-giving substance!) Not a bad diet at all! It's sort of what I "claim" to eat anyway, but this is forcing me to put my money where my mouth is, as it were. After 8 weeks, you add back classes of food, one at a time. This way you are able to isolate your reactions and see what exactly you are reacting to.

So anyway. They send you a checklist to keep track of your supplements, water consumption, and sweating. I have mine on the fridge, and have been doing really well so far. On Day 2, I had a brain fart and had an iced latte at Starbuck's, but have not fallen off the diet wagon other than that. I've taken all my supplements and drunk all my water each day. The one thing I have not done is the sweating. On Day 2, I did my 30 minute bath, but as I have yet to figure out how to incorporate this into my daily routine, I have not been doing the sweats. Uh oh. See, here's the deal with the sweating, quoted from the book that accompanies the plan:

The major detoxification organs of the body are the liver, lungs, GI tract, and skin. Fungal Candida increases the toxicity of the entire body and thus overloads the detoxification system. Therefore it becomes essential to detoxify the body through its largest detoxification organ - the skin. ... Please Note: If you fail to follow the sweating protocol, your body will experience what may look like a cold, sore throat, etc., due to its attempts to detoxify the body through already overloaded systems.

... the sweating that results from [exercise] is not the same as the sweating that occurs during a dry sauna or a hot bath. The sweating that results from a hot bath or sauna involves conducting heat from outside the body to the core of the body, and toxins stored deeper within the body are released. Only sweating that is induced with a sauna or a hot bath will work to efficiently and effectively detoxyfy your body on this plan. If you avoid this step, you will likely develop a sore throat and cold symptoms.

I keep looking at my checklist and saying, "Oh my goodness, I have GOT to do that sweating!" but not doing it. Guess what? Last night, I realized my sinuses were filling up. And I woke up this morning with a sinus headache. It's by no means the worst I've ever had, but it's a great reminder of why the sweating must be done!

I have wasted my "bath" time making this entry, but I am on my way to the gym, where there is a sauna, so I will investigate that for the first time.

So there is my life for the next 15 weeks... Wish me luck! ;-)

*Update*: I took the plunge and did ten minutes in the sauna at the gym. It was fairly pleasant. The time went pretty fast because there was another gal in there to chat with. Interesting: I had sweat running down my leg from my operated knee. My other knee just had a few drops on it. I noticed this one day at physical therapy, too; that my working knee was sweating, but I chalked it up to isolating that leg in the exercises. This is different, my whole body was sweating, but more from operated area. I'm totally, totally fascinated by this!

Back At It!

It's been SO LONG since I posted. Then the old computer died a sudden and complete death. I tried to make a short post from the browser on the iPhone, but of course that didn't work. I could create a post title, but for some reason the box you actually type the entry in was not recognized as a text box. So, no mobile entries for me. I can't wait to get a phone that does not make me scream obscenities every five minutes. April can't come fast enough. (That's when Husband is due for an upgrade. He will inherit the iPhone and I will jump ship to Sprint. I will get the Palm Pre if it's out, and if not, something basic to tide me over until it is.

So this isn't much of a post but I thought I'd start making some short posts about random stuff to get back in the habit. Today's random snippets:

I have a weird and annoying rash on my chest the last couple of days. It doesn't itch so much as sting. I did use Retin-A on it a few times (it was prescribed to get rid of a bit of sun damage on my face, doc said I could use it on the wrinkles as well) and that's the only thing that's changed, so for now I'm blaming that. I do use sunscreen every day, SPF 30, and the parts of my face that I've used the Retin-A on have not reacted the same way, so I don't really know what the problem is.

Husband left Wednesday evening to fly to Tokyo Thursday morning, but the flight cancelled. So he stayed in Dallas overnight, and is going to London instead tonight. He'll fly from London to Chicago on Sunday, and get home about 8:30 that night. We don't care about the Super Bowl so that's no problem. Then he leaves again Tuesday for a four-day trip. I need to find some structure in my life to prevent going nuts while he's gone. He's actually got a pretty good layout for February, it's just this nine days gone with one day home in between that's a long haul for me. There are a ton of things that need doing, but I don't do well with unstructured time.

New computer! This little guy is pretty awesome, I have to say. It's the same memory/hard drive as the laptop I was looking at, but for about half the cost. It's a Dell Hybrid. Tiny thing that sits on the desk and uses 70% less power than a normal tower. Came with a wireless keyboard (in my lap now!) and mouse. In getting it to talk to our internet, we got our service upgraded, so between new computer and faster internet, wheeeee!

New computer also came with Windows Vista. Learning curve there, but not too bad. Installed an old (2000) program and it gave me a message along the lines of "this program is old but we've accomodated it". Biggest problem so far is that Vista can't see my expensive Blue Snowball microphone that I use for my voiceover work. This is a big, and expensive problem. Not only the cost of a new one, but also the money I'm losing by not being able to do my voiceover work.

iHate aPple rant of the day: Old computer died a sudden and total death. Not one file was recoverable. Got a new computer. Downloaded iTunes. Went to sync my iPhone (PS iAm sO oVer tHe iWhatever iThing. oLd! sTupid! sTop iT!) and it updated the software, but what about all the music on my iPhone and iPod? Oh no, so sorry, all those CDs you imported? All those playlists you created? Too bad, you have to reimport and recreate them all. Yes, I'm looking at third party software to do this, but really? It's music I purchased and imported legally. I can also legally put it on my new computer. So why is it only a one-way sync? sTupid aPple!!!

I downloaded Picasa so that I could get all the photos that I've posted there onto the new computer, since over a year of photos was totally lost in the computer crash. I then uploaded the photos I've been hoarding on my camera since December 18th. I wanted to use one for wallpaper, but the proportions are wrong. It makes Husband's head look all squished when it's "fit to screen", too big for tile or center. So I want to resize it. I used to use a program that came with old computer to do this. So I'm messing around with Picasa, but while you can *crop* photos to any size, there does not seem to be a way to *resize* the whole photo. Srsly? This seems to me a very basic and needed function. I used to use it A LOT.

Okay, I really need to go take the Giant Puppy for a long walk, for her sake AND mine. So there are the random snippets for today. I'm sure I'll add more stuff later.

Happy Friday!

Crazy Life :-p

It's a good thing that John and I found each other, because most other people would not be able to put up with our lifestyle!!!

If you are reading this, you probably know that he has to bid his schedule every month. I always write his trips on the calendar in pencil because everything is, at all times, subject to change. Before he went on his last trip, either he told me wrong or I wrote it down wrong.

He went to Los Angeles on Monday, did two three-day Tokyo trips back-to-back, and was going to try to get home on Sunday. But somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, something he ate disagreed with him mightily, and so he went straight to the hotel after landing on Sunday. Slept all day, got up, had soup & gatorade, and went back to bed & slept all night. Well, until like 3am, when he got up to get to the airport for a 5:45 a.m. flight. He was home by noon on Monday, a little wrung out, but okay.

So, according to what I'd written on the calendar, I thought he was not leaving again until Tuesday. But the schedule was actually for him to leave on Saturday and get *home* on Tuesday. Oh, well, okay then.

And then last night around 9:30 pm, as we were cooking dinner, crew schedule called (as they do from time to time) and asked if he could do a Tokyo trip today. He thought about it & talked to me, called the guy back & got it set up. So we threw his uniform shirt into the wash, ate our dinner & went to bed. Got up at 6:00 & got him to the airport before 7:00. He flew to Dallas, then to Los Angeles, arriving in plenty of time to work the flight to Tokyo. He gets back to Los Angeles on Friday morning, and will be home that night.

This replaces the trip that was supposed to go out on Saturday, so now he'll be home for the weekend, and all of next week as well. Hooray!

The point is that not everyone could deal with the last-minute changes that happen all the time in our life. It's inherent in his job, as weather, mechanical problems, scheduling reassignment, or any number of things can change his plans at any time. It's like that when we travel, too, because when we travel on passes, even once we're on the plane it isn't a guarantee, they can still pull us off until the door closes. Sometimes a flight will look fine for us, but people show up from a later flight, so we get bumped. So, we look at other options. When we were coming home from Seattle this happened, we were looking at going home through St Louis and all kinds of other places, just to get home. And when we got married in Vegas, the same thing - He had to go back to Dallas without me, and I ended up going home via Chicago!

In my daily life, I make plans, but they are always fluid. I've never been punctual (a failing, I know) but I am pretty adaptable. If things aren't going to plan, I just change the plan to suit. I know that this was one of the biggest problems/irritations in my last relationship. Changing plans was NOT an easy or acceptable thing. And in John's previous, if he got reassigned or stuck somewhere, it was considered a personal affront and there was hell to pay when he did get home.

So this is just one more reason for me to say, Thank GOD we found each other!!