your favorite workout music?

Treadmill - 12 minutes, .62 miles. Baby steps. Small victories. And so it continues. But, honestly, being on the treadmill is BORRRRRING! So now I'm thinking if I'm truly going to stay motivated to continue this mind over machine quest, I need to put some good workout music on my iPod (right now it just has BPS class audio downloads). Where to start? I know I need to go to iTunes and download some stuff. Any suggestions? What is your favorite music to workout to? Help!

in the ongoing battle

between WOman and machine - Treadmill tried really hard to oust me after just 3 minutes today. But I hung in for a total of 8 minutes, .43 miles. Baby steps. Small Victories. Loving myself for having stuck with this for four days already. Treadmill, you are going down!

Small Victories

I have a friend who is big into couponing. She can go into a grocery store and come out with $600 worth of merchandise, yet pay only $75. She carries a 3 ring binder, indexed by category, filled with trading card protectors that are stuffed to the gills with coupons. It's amazing. Awe-inspiring. And a lot of work. I don't have the time or inclination to be that fanatical about couponing, so I have to settle for small victories. Here's my victories for this week. Giant had individual packs of Stride gum on sale 3/$2.00. I had a $2.00 off coupon.
So I got these FREE! SCORE!

Even better - Giant is running a sale on Luden's cough drops 10 packages for $10.00. You must have their store card to get this price, but you don't have to buy the quantity, you can buy any quantity and it is $1.00 per bag. I have a $1.00 off coupon. Cool. But - I ALSO have a coupon that allows you to DOUBLE your $1.00 off coupon.

Meaning Giant paid me $1.00 to take these off their hands! Now my thrifty friend would have had ten or twenty coupons like this stuffed in her binder and would have really made a profit "buying" these - but you can't get away with that around here. Giant limits you to four doubling coupons per household and it's tracked by that card that you have to use to be entitled to the sale price. Plus, you have to purchase at least $15.00 worth of stuff after all discounts to use the doubling coupons, so they are guaranteed a $15.00 purchase for their $4.00 in doubling coupons. Ah well, I'll take the small victories.

Speaking of small victories - here's another one. I've been faithfully going to Curves three times a week (well, most weeks) and working out pretty hard when I'm there. I'm not eating everything I want either - but I'm still gaining weight. I know this is simple math. Burn more calories than you eat. Ugh. So on Friday, I got re-acquainted with Treadmill. I haven't visited poor Treadmill since this time last year when I first started training for the Breast Cancer 3Day. Treadmill paid me back for my neglect by totally kicking my ass! I made it 5 minutes and .25 miles before I was winded. Which means Curves is NOT meeting my needs for cardio workouts, no matter how hard I'm pushing myself there. So now I'm at war with Treadmill. I've challenged myself to go just another minute or another tenth of a mile each day. Monday I made 6.5 minutes, .35 miles. Okay, it's a very small victory, but I'll take it!

Here's today's results. 7.5 minutes, .4 miles. Take that Treadmill! Ah, small victories.

Electric Buzz

The hum was back on after a 45 minute outage. No idea what caused it, but it was back in time to catch the last 15 minutes of Idol and to reset all the clocks in the house before going to bed. We did discover that we have 3 working flashlights and quite a few candles when needed. Becca got to brush her teeth and get ready for bed by candlelight, while I managed by flashlight. Normally without t.v. or computer I would easily fall back on reading, but did you know you can't read without light??? No wonder our ancestors got up with the sun and went to bed with the sun. Not much to do when the lights are out (okay, so not much that I'd blog about anyway).

Quick Post - No Power

For reasons unknown, our power has gone out. And the whole neighborhood as far as we can see through the windows. Usually it is out for a minute or two - not this time. It's been a half-hour already. I've got whatever battery power is left for the UPS before I run out of computer life as well. And I'm missing the American Idol results show. Funny how you don't know how fully electricity affects you until you don't have it. :)

I'll let you know how it goes later.

More Monday Musings

Monday - it's a snow day. The first REAL snowfall we've had all season. No school. But I've been working and I'm exhausted already. I had to be up and out on the roads early anyway. my Monday
7:00 a.m.: breakfast, check e-mail, deal with some work stuff
7:45 a.m.: shower, dress, get ready to run
8:30 a.m.: drive to the orthopedist. In the snow. Rachel got her cast off. Her wrist is stiff and sore and won't bend. I'm led to understand that is normal and will ease over the next few days/weeks. Anyone with experience care to chime in?
10:00 a.m.: drive Rachel back home, pick up Sarah and drive (in the snow) to dentist appointment.
11:00 a.m. - drive home (in the snow) from dentist, start laundry, grab lunch
11:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.: work from home, including the odious task of submitting medical receipts to flex pay which involves babysitting the fax machine - feeding through one sheet at a time. Ugh.
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.: shovel snow - including the 2 foot wall that the snow plows left at the bottom of the driveway. Hopefully that makes up for the fact that Curves is closed today.
4:00 p.m.: hit the internet. Yeah!

Okay, I know I've been MIA for too long and I can't tell you I have any great excuse, other than that life has been busy (see above) and I've been, well, kind of depressed lately. Not any one thing I can specifically point to, but rather a laundry list of little reasons to be down in the dumps:

• a general distaste for winter - I'm really looking forward to Spring!
• the feeling that controlling my weight has become a life long chore (and not a particularly successful or gratifying one either - witnessed by the recent climb in numbers on my scale),
• feeling deeply for my good friend's recent loss of her sister,
• feeling overwhelmed with the number of projects in front of me, the lack of time in which to accomplish them, and the general discontent of feeling non-productive and having no idea where to even begin,
• in general, missing that feeling of being truly creative and being alive.

Having identified at least some of the source of my discontent, I guess it's now up to me to do something about it. First things first. I'm letting go of Project 365. I've imported my Project 365 blog posts to this blog so I don't lose the work I've done, but I don't have the time or energy to maintain a separate blog for it. I've also found that it gets boring quickly when all your photos are of "things" rather than people. With three teenage daughters who WON'T let me take their picture, and a husband who doesn't want to document everyday stuff like me cutting his hair, but only wants photos of birthdays, holidays and vacations - well, you can only imagine how frustrating it gets to take a daily photo of nothing. So Project 365 is getting shelved in favor of ones that will bring me more happiness and satisfaction.

As for the rest, I think I need to sit myself down with a planner and break down some of these projects into baby steps and set some goals and deadlines for myself. Or maybe give myself a swift kick in the butt to get into gear.

Monday Musings

Now that Facebook seems to have become a part of my everyday life, I look back and wonder at this journey. I started my Facebook account last September or October as a way to keep up with some scrapbooking friends. Then I "found" my best friend from college on FB. Next, my best friend from high school. Hooking up with these pieces of my past was exciting - and scary. I wasn't sure what reception I would receive or what (if anything) might come of it all. I'm still not sure. Very recently I have been "friended" by many of my current colleagues from work. It's a social experiment of sorts to see what business use we might make of online networking. Intriguing - and scary. It has opened up areas of my life to people who, until now, have only seen a very small part of who I am. And I've been pondering what that means to me and how or whether it will change the way I view FB and my interactions on that forum. As I'm musing on all of this...

I have a few blogs that I follow regularly and a few not-so-regularly. One of my all-time favorite non-scrapbooking blogs is "Ordinary Courage" largely because every one of Brene's posts are thought-provoking and resonate with me. They are the prompts for journal writing and pondering. And her most recent post was just as timely and meaningful to me. Brene writes about her journey into FB and meeting up with people who were friends of a version of herself she had long since left behind. In the post, Brene says:

Part of midlife is scooping up all the different versions of yourself that you’ve created to please folks, and integrating them into one whole, authentic person. This is tough work for me. I’m so good at assessing exactly who I need to be and when I need to be it. It’s really too bad that "alternating" eventually sucks your soul right out of your body.

WOW. That is right where I am in life. Trying to take all those different versions of me and fit them into a single, fully integrated, whole, authentic person. Integrating instead of Alternating. Not just "Rachel and Becca's Mom". Not just "the attorney." Not just that version of me that the situation of the moment requires. All of me. Scary. Exciting. Maybe even freeing - once you actually get there. And so now I'm pondering the whole concept of integration. Am I prepared for my scrapbooking friends to get a peek at the professional me? Am I prepared for my professional colleagues to see a little of who I am outside the confines of the office? Am I prepared for those faces from the past to see me in the present... and how far I have come from that shy, awkward girl who kept her head down and nose buried in a book in order to avoid painful social interaction? I'm pretty sure I'm ready. Which means I'll just continue to be "me" on FB. No changes to suit the audience. Cool. One less thing to stress about. Thanks Brene.