Dragonwolf

Here's a fun one for you. Black bear fat is primarily oleic acid, the same one olive oil is prized for. Apparently black bears are olives with claws. But seriously, if Grandma really did swear by it as a skincare product, that's probably why. That said, tallow is also a fantastic skincare product, as well, because its fatty acid ratios are close to our own and the body can use it directly. Lard works in a pinch, but for moisturizing purposes isn't quite as good as it doesn't absorb quite as well.

Blood-shot eyes peer out from under the oversized hood of the warm-weather traveling cloak that had been keeping the too-bright late-spring sunlight from making her headache worse. Mentally and emotionally exhausted, the Ranger flops down in a booth as the barkeep brings a glass of Irish Cream, a bottle of hard cider, and a package of peanut butter M&Ms to her table. Dragonwolf wearily nods her thanks to the barkeep. She takes a sip of the Irish Cream as her mind drifts toward the thought of setting up her hammock and not leaving it for the next month. I'm not doing a challenge this time around (and probably for a while), but I figured I'd check in here to see what's going on. Therapy has been brutal and isn't slated to get much better anytime soon. That's challenge enough for me for some time.

Wait....what?

I got to go camping this past weekend! \o/ Tried out a shiny new cooler-weather sleeping bag. Worked about as well as to be expected in a hammock (sleeping bag = compression of insulation = less insulation on the bottom; apparently, the better way to go is with what's called an "underquilt," which goes under the hammock, itself and therefore doesn't get compressed). Energy has been pretty good and seems to be steadily increasing (::fingers crossed::). I've been making great use of my standing desk of late as a result. The nice weather has also helped, since I can open the windows and have fresh air coming in, and I can start taking the dogs for walks during the day. Yoga seems to be working best first thing in the morning. Roll out of bed, do a couple of poses (which has the added bonus of helping further stretch and loosen everything up).

OMG, my body is pissing me off right now. One day, I'm itching to do things, the next I have zero energy. And my sleep has been hit or miss for no apparent reason. :angry: This whole less than an hour of deep sleep per night (tracked by my Fitbit) is getting old. I want good sleep, dammit! On the upside, I got my new desk! \o/ It's a Jarvis adjustable desk and it's nice. So sturdy and easy to adjust and easy to stand at for some time. <3 Language learning is still going well, but I can't say the same for the exercise (thanks in part to the above sleep issues, which result in me feeling like shit unless I let myself sleep until later). What's particularly frustrating are the days when I feel like I have so much energy, but then I have other things that need done, and then I then can't get to sleep and then I feel like shit the next day. :facepalm:

Indeed they can. Nothing like working muscles you didn't even know existed. :lol:

Mainly just push-ups and (attempting) pull-ups on them and toying around with dips. I don't have a lot of space and even less vertical space, so I couldn't do the more...dramatic...stuff even if I was capable of doing so, but they're a hell of a workout on their own. Go for it! It's been working fantastically for the husband, so there's certainly something to it. I'm working on Dutch right now.

Oh look, another week has gone by already. I went off my dietary plan over the weekend. Popcorn at the theater with friends on Friday and the most divine mashed potatoes (high quality potatoes + cream + bone broth + butter = :yum: ) at dinner on Sunday. That's okay, it happens, though I have been feeling it the past couple of days. It certainly reinforces the notion that such things aren't really for me anymore. I finally got my money in from my invoices for work, so I promptly ordered my new standing desk. \o/ I went with a Jarvis from Fully. Bamboo top with contour and a monitor shelf. I can't wait for it to get here. We officially left the Kindred. We'll do an oath releasing ceremony....at some point. We need to make those arrangements with the leadership. It actually feels kind of good to not be tied to them anymore, really. There are a few members we plan on keeping a relationship with, but now it's on our terms, which is nice. For the others, well, the ball's in their court, now. I've been hollowing out eggs to decorate for springtime and Sigurblot. Hubby laughed when he saw how I get the egg out of the shell for that purpose. I've got 5 or 6 eggs so far for it. The plan is to build an altar and have a few on it for spring, and save a few for decorating on Sigurblot day (April 20th). With any luck, I'll be able to do a sort of "party, take two" and have a couple people over and we can all decorate eggs together (and hopefully, we'll have enough eggs to do so, but that's why I'm starting now ).

A lot's happened since the start of the last challenge. I won't go into full detail here, but I'm in a much better mental state now. As I've mentioned and explained elsewhere, I changed my diet and went back to carnivore (yo, Dragon, you're taking the whole "wolf" thing a bit too literally, aren't you?) and it's done wonders for my overall health. I think my holistic doctor thinks it's just a phase (it helps that it's still winter and would be consistent with what some human groups have had to do, historically, this time of year), but is otherwise on board, thankfully. A fair bit of therapy has helped, too, if for no other reason than it being an outlet for all the stressors in my life. Cleaning house of some of the more negative/toxic influences has also done wonders. So, I'm back with the Rangers for my more usual challenges! Body Get back to my gymnastic rings. I actually want to work out again! \o/ This is my big goal/challenge. Ideally, 3-4 days per week. Move more during the day in general. I got too deep into the habit of just sitting while working. Hopefully I can get me a new desk soon, which will help. Also, attempt to find a trainer around here that does barbell medicine/recovery training. I want someone local, so they can watch my form in real-time and make sure it's spot-on. Mind Continue my morning Duolingo sessions. I'm really loving this and the sort of productivity/accomplishment jump-start. Soul I've been trying to get back into yoga/taichi/meditation on a daily basis, but it hasn't been working as well as I'd have hoped. Part of that's been due to later starts than I'd like in the mornings, which pushes my whole day later and I end up not having much, if any time after other obligations (it doesn't help that my current client wants me clocking closer to 40 hours per week, which is actually technically beyond full-time billable workload by many standards). Part of it's due to just not prioritizing it. I'd like to find a way to change that. Even if it's just the little "micromeditations" or whatever you want to call them, prompted by the app that my husband has (which prompts him randomly to do a 1-minute meditation).

Only two in the state and the closest one is over an hour away, but that's better than nothing. Going to ping one and see if I get a response and any help on this front. Maybe they can point me to someone local. :fingers_crossed:

Wow, has it been a week already? Just about. I feel great, too. Already, my back no longer hurts like it did. I've had fewer spasms that had been happening. My hips aren't hurting, either. I feel like I'm handling stress far better, too. The little things aren't overwhelming me like they were even a week or two ago. Hubby and I ended up talking about leaving our Kindred due to the lack of respect that they've shown me (I don't think them having the decency to not blatantly interrupt or ignore me when I'm talking is too much to ask) and the only real thing I had gotten upset about was the holiday planning stuff that I was working on that led up to that conversation (suffice it to say, my jadedness as to people's response to my efforts was showing). Once it became clear that that was what was bothering me about it, he brought up the idea to leave (again, we've been kicking this around for several months at this point). I did notice that taking my liquid supplements in the evening has had a negative effect on my sleep quality. I suspect it might be the Vitamin D, so I took it all in the morning and I'll see how tonight goes. To be honest, I considering just dropping them entirely, but we'll see.

I took yesterday off from work. Aside from kiddo getting sent home from school (which hubby was kind enough to field), it was glorious. I spent pretty much the entire morning in the bathtub, spending most of that time chatting with a friend about runes (I post a weekly rune study thing to the group's Discord server, where I go over a rune and we talk about it). I then spent the rest of the day mulling about some, then playing with my VR stuff. I played through my stuff on Farlands (a little VR exploration game), and then did what I haven't done in quite some time -- I actually played Skyrim VR. I played for a solid two hours or so, which is a feat with that game, because it's very easy to get VR sickness from it, since it wasn't really built for VR (there are a number of ways to mitigate that, which I've done, but traversing a lot of the stairs gets sketchy). Also, like I reported in my Battle Log, I've decided to go back to a carnivore way of eating. The details regarding why are there, but it boils down to the fact that I do far better eating that way. I'm a week into it and already noticing significant improvement in my ability to tolerate stress, my sleep quality, my back and hip pain, and overall desire to do things. My overall concentration is still on the low side, but my ability to keep working for more than 4 hours seems to have improved (I'm currently on 6.5 hours of post-lunch work and not mentally exhausted). Morning Duolingo is still working well. I like having the bit of accomplishment to get the day started, even before getting out of bed. I still need to stop myself from falling into the trap of looking at other things before getting up, though. I'm also still bad about doing the yoga stuff more often. That'll probably be the next step, now that I'm out of that mental funk, though I've been considering getting up early enough to get back into my morning weight lifting routine, probably starting next week (but maybe as early as Thursday, though I don't like starting in the middle of the week like that).

Repeating this for reinforcement. I actually stumbled on gluten being the cause of my own eczema trigger when I went (back to) Paleo for other reasons and suddenly found that a patch that just would. not. heal. (even with steroid cream) started healing with no other intervention. I would say be sure to see a dermatologist. General practitioners don't have the deep training and are likely to just give a cookie-cutter band-aid solution (as my GP at the time put it - "welcome to the club, here's a steroid cream. Good luck!") instead of looking for the underlying cause.

Fuck it, I'm going back to carnivore Long story short, several years ago, my MyFitnessPal low carb group did a "Meativore May" challenge after some interest in going carnivore (it was very rare then), with which I had great success, but a few months later, it got turned upside down and did so in such a way that I struggled heavily to get back to it. (Apparently, carnivore + Metformin = a horrible aversion to the ground bison that was my staple food up until that point and intense cravings for sugary foods. WTF?) I spent the intervening years trying to get back to it and struggling for some unknown reason, so I decided to try to work with a holistic doctor to see if I could get a mixed diet that worked for me. It did...at first. I lost 10lbs and was feeling good. I was sleeping better and wasn't as anxious as I had been when I sought her out. ...and then the wheels fell off. I gained that weight back, I've got more sugar cravings, my back has started hurting again, my hips have stiffened up again (oh, and now my knee's bothering me), I'm finding acne and headaches starting to come back, and my sleep quality has started degrading again (things that had gone away as carnivore). Worst of all, I'm finding myself unable to handle stress and be able to function. Granted, I have a lot of stress going on right now, but I'm mentally exhausted 3-4 hours into my work day. That's not good... I feel like I'm spending an exorbitant amount of money on supplements for essentially nothing. Granted, some of them have helped tremendously and I'll probably keep going with them at least for a while, but I intend to pare down the ones that haven't been helping as much. But I never forgot how I felt on carnivore and despite all the supplements and following her dietary guidelines (which are essentially Paleo), I never got quite to that point. Even at my best, I was struggling to get the motivation to get back to working out and actually do things, and more recently, I've found myself wanting to sit and having to pretty much force myself to do even something like a little bit of yoga/Tai Chi/stretching to loosen up my hips and back. So fuck it, I'm done. I've found myself being almost driven back to carnivore at this point. I'm tired of dealing with the flora minefield (especially since I don't have my native-plant garden yet) -- those have oxalates (if my run-in with Virginia Creeper is any indication, me and oxalates don't mix), those are nightshades (possible autoimmune trigger for me?), those are above the bitterness threshold (yay, supertaster...), those are sugary, those I can do but they're starchy so I have to be careful on quantity... At this point, my general rule regarding plant food is going to be if I can't grow/harvest it myself, I'm not eating it anymore. Maybe in three or four years, when I get a harvest of serviceberries, I'll put some serviceberry sauce on my steak or something, but until then this mixed diet thing clearly isn't working for me. But I need it to be manageable for me. The "eat meat, drink water" method doesn't really work for me. I much prefer the principia carnivora method - meat, dairy, eggs, etc. are all fine if well-tolerated. If it's animal-sourced, it's fair game. I do have one caveat - no/minimal fluid dairy not from A2/A2 animals (including cream) and favor A2/A2 dairy in all cases (that's less feasible than just the fluid dairy, but it's an ongoing project). I've got a quart of plain, unsweetened hemp milk open that I plan on finishing (which I use as the base for the bone broth protein shakes I've had more recently), but once that's gone, it's gone.

lol, no, not no deadlifts. No trainers who focus on rehabilitation using barbell training, particularly when dealing with degenerative disc disease (which is a completely different beast from rehab after acute injuries). I'd been looking off and on for many years now, after I found one in Australia that did it. At first, there was no one at all that I could find here in the US. Since it's not uncommon for me to find something and have it click for me ("this makes sense! Why is no one doing this?!") before it really becomes a "thing," I've been waiting and keeping an eye out. A few years later, I started finding them stateside....but on the west coast (go figure, though that doesn't help me here in the Midwest). I've thus far yet to find a therapist in my general region, let alone anything reasonably nearby. Ideally, I'd train with them in person at least for a while, given how I've been struggling and basically losing the battle to the point that I haven't been able to deadlifts in forever and even bodyweight squats are sketchy, let alone weighted in any manner.

I suck at doing the yoga stuff on a daily basis, plain and simple. Whether it's in the morning or in the afternoon, doing it daily just isn't happening for whatever reason. It doesn't help that the way my back hurts means doing the very things to loosen it up cause pain that doesn't really go away (unfortunately, it's not just muscle pain; I've got degenerated discs at L4-L5 and L5-S1 -- the ones that allow you bend...like...at all). I'm still doing it at least a few times a week, which is good, though, and am more apt to do it when I'm working at my home office desk (as opposed to the living room couch or the coffee shop). This is kind of a mixed blessing, though, I think, because I think my desk setup is exacerbating the back pain. That's largely due to me being in desperate need of a new desk...but I can't do that until my client pays me what they owe from the beginning of February (I hate net 30 payment arrangements; thanks for keeping me from investments so I can be more productive for you, just so you can squeeze out a few extra cents of interest in your bank account...). I can't deny that I feel better when I do it, though, especially when I'm working in my office. The obvious answer is "set a reminder," but it's less about remembering to do it and more about having the motivation to do it, and let's face it -- it's hard to have motivation about something that causes actual pain (not the discomfort of a good workout, which I actually enjoy). I have been keeping up with the morning language learning routine, though. When I first downloaded Duolingo, I started with Japanese, but I found that learning the language and the alphabets (plural, because Japanese) to be too much with Duo alone (they start with Hiragana, which is fine, but then throw in Katakana and Kanji at seeming random even early on; dammit, let me get one down first!). So I switched to Dutch, which has been far easier, if for no other reason than it uses the exact same alphabet as English. I'm still at a level of approximately a three-year-old child, but it's sticking a lot more, which is what matters. Once I get more comfortable, I also have a bunch of Dutch friends to practice with. And to the point of doing that exercise in general - it has proven to help me get going most days. I'm still laying in bed for half an hour, but that half hour is more productive and gives me that initial "hey, I got this done, let's go get more stuff done" feeling, and usually, when I'm done, I get up and get moving. Clearly, I need to wake my brain up, first. I'm still clearly not 100%, mentally, though. I find myself wearing out more quickly at work. I get maybe three or four hours (not consecutive) of truly productive work in before I find my motivation and concentration to start flagging and overwhelm starts to set in. It's taken me three days to finish a page I've been working on, which under normal circumstances would take about half that. Even now, I'm at the point of "just one more style change. Okay, now just this one more style change..." I start working between 9 and 10 and even with a break at lunch time, I still find myself ready to call it quits about 4. Very much not good as a software developer getting paid by the hour... Two therapy sessions a week certainly gets through things faster, though I doubt I'm going to continue with that cadence after the scheduled ones are done. It's not working like I'd hoped I'd be able to make them work. I'd really prefer a single 2-hour session, because my problem is mostly because it feels like I just get going before I have to stop again. The number of scheduled appointments at the current cadence should be sufficient to get all of the background info in. I hope, anyway. There's a lot of shit to dredge up. I have a relatively light week this week, which should help. Just therapy and a support group meeting on my schedule. Maybe I could actually figure out something to do for me. I do still need to schedule another massage, though...

@DaemonCorax please tell me that's a genuine sentiment and you have some resources on that front. I miss my deadlifts and know that there are some people who use them as physical therapy, but last I checked, I was lucky to find any on my continent.

Yeah. Never, ever, ever cross the person feeding you. You never know what they might put in your food...or drink.

lol, he's just a Soul Eater*. He likes garlic, himself, just not eating it like candy like I'd been doing with the pickled garlic. * AKA - a ginger

Got a massage yesterday. <3 It's amazing how much better life in general is when you can move and your back isn't a giant knot... I have been mandated by both my therapist and my holistic doctor to do more stuff for me (go figure), albeit the manifestations for both are slightly different. My therapist is actually helping me conspire to take a week or two off and travel for a (very much needed) vacation away from everything. That's going to be interesting. I mentioned to my holistic doctor that I've dreaded getting out of bed in the mornings, because of all of the stuff that's going on and the sense of "what's it going to be like today?" wearing me down. Her solution is a morning routine to get me going and energized to get the day started. We'll see how that works out in the long run (since I'm not totally sure she understands the full extent of the problem, given I don't have enough time with her to give her the full context). Right now, that routine is shaping up to be something like: Spend 20 minutes or so doing exercises on Duolingo to get the brain going, while I do my don't-even-think-about-getting-out-of-bed-before-this stretching of my hips/lower back. Get showered/dressed. Do a little yoga/tai chi routine to get the body going. Don't look at email or social media of any sort during this time. As for more "do stuff for me" things that my therapist wants me to do...I have no idea on that one. It's supposed to be fun, relaxing stuff, but I've done leisure stuff on my own (without my family) for so long that that's not really what I want to do, but I also need a break from my husband (from whom I can literally feel the anxiety when he gets anxious, and right now, he gets anxious about damn near everything; there have been times where I can't even be in the house because of it). I did request extra therapy appointments for a while, though. I wanted to do doubles (so get (and pay for) two hours instead of one, because I feel like I just start getting going and time's up), but she doesn't like doing that. Hopefully two a week for a little while to get through all of the "backstory" stuff without having too much time for "current events" stuff to pile up will help, especially on the bad weeks.

I am so glad I'm not the only one! My husband looks at me like I've grown a second head.

Pickled garlic is awesome. That is all.

I made it. I did hit a slick patch on one small hill and almost had a repeat of Sunday evening, but I managed to find enough grip to get up. Once I got to the bigger roads, it was all clear. Thankfully, I went to high school in a mountainous area, so I know how to handle things. Unfortunately, my car needs new tires and it doesn't snow enough around here to warrant chains or studs, which would have solved the problem to begin with.

Adventure In The Hills I haven't checked out the Tai Chi stuff yet, but I did go to the nearby National Forest to visit some friends and participate in a group ritual they were holding. I went down Saturday night, since the ritual was in the morning and I needed some time to unwind and get into the right headspace. I spent Sunday with them, which was great. As we were finishing up the ritual, the snow started to fall. No big deal, right? It was a nice little snowfall in the hills on a winter day. Pretty idyllic, really, given that we were literally gathered near a fire in a cabin on a hill. So, evening comes, and the sun is getting low in the sky. Some of the people trickle out as their travel and schedule needs dictate, while some of the others (myself included) hang around for a bit longer. When it's about as late as we dare, myself and another get ready to head out, with her a few minutes ahead of me. I head out, realizing immediately that this could easily be a bad idea as my tires have a hard time gripping (really should get new tires...), but I take it slow and make it around the first few curves and over the first few little hills...until I don't. Thankfully, the road is one not frequently traveled as my car loses grip part way up one hill a bit steeper, longer, and in just a little more shade than the previous ones, and in my caution to avoid sliding in a curve, I fail to get going fast enough to make it up and over, and stall out (not literally stalling the car, but stalling in momentum) about halfway up. So, I slowly let off the gas to start working my way back down to potentially try again, only to find the car starting to curve in as it slid. Now, while turning around wouldn't have been a bad thing, it was a narrow road and I'd have preferred to do that myself. At the driveway a little farther down... Thankfully, it stopped at about perpendicular to the road, and I was able to straighten it out and slowly back down the hill, keeping it straight in part to driving on the invisible shoulder... Which I then had to extricate myself from (you have to understand: around here, the should is a few inches below the road, making it a sort of track in this situation). Thankfully, only my front tire was on the shoulder, and I was able to coax the front one onto the road again with some very careful reverse steering. I backed down a little more, to a point that wasn't so steep and...nope. No movement. Okay, back down a bit more, nearly to the bottom, get going a little more, but start losing grip almost immediately, at which point visions of sliding on one of the curves and ending up in a ditch or off the edge of one of the ravines start flashing in my mind, along with the dread of having to traverse the mountainous back roads in this condition, knowing the route that lay between me and the big state route in the valley Nope. Fuck it. I'm going back and staying put for the night. I carefully pull into the nearby driveway and manage to coax my car back out of it, facing the other direction, and gingerly make my way back to the cabin, adrenaline still coursing through my veins from my brush with disaster. "Well, so much for that plan," I say as I walk in the door, and recount the short version of what happened. At that point, the last remaining not-quite-local person decided to stay put, too, given the condition of her own vehicle, while the local one braved the roads to go home, reporting in at intervals (which confirmed that traversing the roads were not pleasant). I happened across a notification for the Snow Emergency level of a nearby county, while perusing updates from other friends, so I checked to see what the status was for here. As it turned out, this county was under a Level 2 Snow Emergency. For those who aren't familiar with the system, it's a gauge for how bad the conditions are. It contains three levels: Level 1 - roads are hazardous, but not necessarily horrible. If you go out, be cautious, give yourself extra time, try to plan trips such that you minimize time on the road. Most schools start calling delays and closures if this happens too late at night or into the early morning. Level 2 - Roads are very hazardous and covered, don't go out unless you have to. Expect to take far longer getting to your destination. Universities, private schools, and other harder-to-close institutions start calling delays and closures. Level 3 - Roads are not safe to drive, go out only if it's an emergency, or you're likely to get pulled over. Businesses start closing (and will send people home if they get word the county is planning to escalate to this level). Suffice it to say, we stayed put for the night. Now, it's morning, and I'm about to try again, as the sun is up, the temperature is above freezing, and the plows have gone through at least the bigger roads, even if not this little one.

Don't expect to get into the stereotypical meditative state right away. Odds are very good that you'll have trouble the first few times with keeping your mind calm for more than a few dozen seconds, let alone getting deep into any kind of trance/semi-conscious state. Don't give up. Just like with physical exercise programs, you'll slowly build and before you know it, you'll be able to do it for however long you want to. You probably didn't start being able to do pull-ups/muscle-ups. Think of the deep meditative states as muscle-ups for your mind.