Black Daiquiri battles the pink robots

[imjustarogue]

 

I’ve decided that the format of the 4-week challenges hasn't been working for me for a variety of reasons, with the big reason being I keep trying to cram too many things into the challenges and the second being the challenge time frame's schedule frequently don't mesh with my life’s schedule. I also tended to want to use my challenge threads to talk about what was going on in my life in general, but then I felt like it wasn’t really keeping in the spirit of the challenge because I wasn’t talking about my challenge because I wasn’t actually doing the challenge. The combination of all of that led to me fizzling out of the challenge threads and just feeling like a big, old puddle of faaaaiiiiilllllll.

 

With that thought in mind, I’ve decided I’m going to use the challenges to focus on a single thing for the 4 weeks, i.e. get out and walk/run 3x per week or do some training for an upcoming event following “this” schedule or something along those lines. And my battle log will be for my “everything else” - my diet plans and ideas and recipe finds, my thinky-thoughts, my extra fitness plans that fall outside of the challenge (because they do happen on occasion - honest!)

 

Below I’ll include links to my current challenge as a quick way to find me there and maybe I’ll do a periodic summary.. Kind of like end of challenge summaries, but maybe these will be end of event summaries or something? Like “how did my training for this thing go?” or “how did I handle this stress around this event?” or something… I dunno. I’ll have to think about that a little more. But I think it’ll be good to have a periodic overview/look back every so often.

 

Tally-ho!

 

***

Current challenge:

 

[imjustarogue]

So, there’s always a lot going on and it’s always on us to decide how much of a priority fitness is in our life. In Steve’s wise words, “I don’t have time” really means “I don’t consider fitness to be as high priority to me as X right now.”

 

There have been many, many Xs in my life over the past couple years. Some are quite valid - such as being pregnant and having some physical issues such as extra hypermobile joints making something simple as walking more dangerous to me than it should have been; and some less valid and more just plain excuses - such as not wanting to ask someone to babysit so I could have time to focus on my fitness.

 

I’ve also been dealing with a resurgence of anxiety this year due in large part to my husband spending most of it out of state. That turned out to be harder than we both anticipated. He’s coming home tomorrow and staying home, though this means that his job may be at risk because - even though he has told his employer that he is not interested in moving out of state due to family reasons, they would still prefer him to be on-site, he is planning on working from home with periodic trips back to the office. We are in kind of a “wait and see” situation with this, though he is still putting out resumes and indications of interests in positions at other companies.

 

And, we are in the final stages of buying our house. Waiting on the appraisal, so we’ll see what comes of that and then we get to go through the bank stuff and all of that.

 

My daughter is graduating from high school this Sunday. Huge deal - and kind of scary. And after we move out, she will stay in our house until we sell it, so we’re going to help her figure out some financial stuff for utilities and such and I’m kind of scared/nervous for her/her boyfriend because I honestly don’t think they make enough to live on their own… Plus, there’s the whole getting her into college thing. She needs to take a placement test and then register for her program and I think we need to talk with her financial aid people and get her some more loans or something because the ones that will be provided by the fafsa won’t cover her tuition alone let alone any living expenses (thanks to us being not poor parents…). Husband and I have briefly joked (not-joked) about telling the kids to just get married so the fafsa will stop taking our taxes into consideration when looking at their financials for school. >.> School tuition be fucked up, yo.

 

So much stress and anxiety! Argle-blargle!

 

But, the weather is starting to look beautiful! And our Insane Inflatable 5K is coming up next month! (along with a bajillion other things now…) So, it’s the perfect time to start training for it, right?! And no time like the present, so I think tonight after dinner, bebe and I will go for a “more vigorous than strolling with the stroller” walk.

[imjustarogue]

OMG today.

 

I was supposed to get up at 6ish to get ready to go pick up husband from the airport. At 5, my wonderful stomach decided that it was the perfect time to hate me and get rid of whatever it had digested overnight. THANKS STOMACH! i hate you. >.>

 

Then, bebe and I got ready and picked up stepson and drove 2 hours to the airport, and picked up hubby. YAY! And on the way back, with me lacking sleep and husband lacking sleep (he had an overnight flight with 3 layovers), my wonderful brain thought "You know what would be an absolutely great thing to do for daughter's graduation party? She'll love it! Make a video collage of all of the cheers and dance and flags performances you've recorded to play in the background!!" And I thought, "Hey, yeah, that'd be great!" but then realized, "Shit, the party is Sunday. That's 2 days away." And had a mild panic attack in the car on the way home. THANKS BRAIN! i hate you too. 

 

I've managed to work something out since I have everything saved in Google Photos, but because I have literally hundreds of photos and gifs and videos in albums of her cheerleading and dancing, Chrome kept getting bogged down and I had to restart my computer three times while working on my solution. Cross your fingers that it will work well enough for the party.....

 

Tomorrow will be fairly chill until the evening when I do the prep and decoration in the evening. >.<

 

i still kind of hate both my stomach and my brain.

[imjustarogue]

Graduation complete and I didn't even cry. Her last dance performance got more waterworks from me than watching her walk across the stage to pick up her diploma. But, a large part of that was probably because we'd been there for an hour by that point (got there about 45 minutes early so we could get a decent enough seat to see her and ended up with a fantastic sunburn and spent most of the time attempting to shade the bebe enough so *he* didn't also end up with a fantastic sunburn as well...)

 

And her party was also a success! There was a lot of running around setting up stuff in the morning and then some running around between the ceremony and the party, but she was so happy, so it was so worth it.

 

Now to take a breather until the next thing.  

[imjustarogue]

I cannot wait to move. And I'm pretty sure this house can't wait to get rid of us.

 

The upstairs shower has had a slow leak somewhere into my daughter's ceiling (this is the second time this has happened since we've lived in this house) and it is not an easy fix because the house is 100+ years old and nothing in the house is up to any sort of code... And when the previous owners remodeled the bathroom, the shower drain had some serious issues which have led to us having *this* serious issue twice now... and UGH.

 

We are planning on selling as is to an investor-buyer who is interested in buying it for what we owe (and hopefully enough extra to cover any additional selling costs) and running as far away from it as possible, but now we're doing that with a new, large hole in what was my daughter's bedroom ceiling. I say "was" because this incident, and my husband's prying at the ceiling, released the mustiness, nasty odor from water collecting in the old wood and drywall and plaster, so she and her bf are moving into the boys room, baby's crib is moved into ours, step-son's computer will move into baby's play room, and step-son's other stuff will get stored until we move (he has chosen to sleep on the couch lately the couple nights he spends here a week, so we're storing his bed until the move since we don't really have room for it elsewhere). I'm a little nervous about him hanging out in the baby's playroom just because he gets a little nervous and anxious easily and bebe can be quite a handful, so we'll just have to play it by ear and see.

 

Anyway, we got the crib moved, I packed up a bunch of ceramic masks I've collected for about 20 years (so bebe wouldn't play with them), got some of daughter's stuff up in her new room, and ran up and down the stairs a lot. This has been a surprisingly smooth, and less frustrating or argumentative stressful situation than might have been in other circumstances, and I'm ok with that.

 

It's only for a month. I hope. (of course... that's if the appraiser actually set up a date to go appraise the house... since the mortgage guy said we should have heard from the appraiser about that... >.>)

 

And now to go calm bebe who I just accidentally woke by sneezing from all of the riled up dust. And then maybe some sleep...

[tourennatrix]

9 hours ago, Black Daiquiri said:

now we're doing that with a new, large hole in what was my daughter's bedroom ceiling.

At least, from the buyer's perspective, you're not trying to hide anything?

[imjustarogue]

This is true. It will be wide open, for all to see. >.>

[imjustarogue]

My mini vacation was a blast! I ended up buying myself a pretty awesome skirt and chemise and a hip-noisemaker-jingle-belt that I'll wear for bebe. I didn't get (more) sunburned, though the heat did give me a few sweat blisters from my last sunburn the week before. 

 

Husband is making progress tearing out the one room's ceiling, but it was interrupted by the possible sound of a bird falling down the vertical exhaust pipe of our pellet stove. Since we're moving, and taking the stove with us, he decided it was a good time to take the pipes apart to save the bird (if there actually was one - the cats seemed to think so, but we couldn't confirm it). I had gone up to take a shower, but he said that he ended up chasing a little bird that looked like a soot sprite out of the house, so we did save one (yay!) and when he took apart the horizontal portion, he carefully shook out the ash silt and a nest and a second soot covered bird slid out. Neither were on the front porch in the morning, so I think they managed to shake off the soot and survive, so yay!

 

Two days interruption to the ceiling teardown. *sigh* And I think that maybe shark week may be coming because I am just in the most horrible mood. I have been super angry about things that I'm usually just mildly frustrated about and I don't like it. /sigh

[tourennatrix]

How big we're the soot sprites?

Hunter: SO BIG

 

[imjustarogue]

Probably. I wish I'd held off on my shower so I could have seen husband chasing soot sprite birb around the living room.

[imjustarogue]

Neat thing I just read about the Y in the town we may be moving to (we'll find out Friday how the appraisal went... *crosses fingers*) - they have a Kid's Cove daycare thing for when you go to workout, and I guess just recently, they made it free for up to 2 hours while you're there exercising as long as you're a member.

 

Kind of excited about this because bebe hasn't had a lot of exposure to other bebe's (which is probably a good part of why he hasn't been sick at all in his vast 15 months of life), but I would like to have him have some play time with bebe's his age, and it'd be up to 2 hours while I can go off and do my own thing (and, oh boy, I can feel the separation anxiety kick in already and it's not even a thing yet!). The free bit is only icing since, for non-members, it's only $5, so it's not like it'd be super expensive, but I think it sounds really cool.

 

Plus, they also have a Water Babies class too, and it'd be fun to get him involved in something like that too. We just bought a little inflatable pool and he literally had *no* idea.

[tourennatrix]

*crosses fingers!*

[imjustarogue]

Shit's getting real, yo!

 

All that's left is setting the actual appointment for the closing on the house and a final walk-through. o.o

 

OMG. WE'RE MOVING. Closing date will be in about 2 weeks. We've started packing boxes. Every time I think about it my stomach starts doing that weird flipping thing that stomachs do.

 

Things that freak me out:

Moving. This is kind of a big one. I haven't *really* moved in 20-something years... and when I did, everything I owned could fit in a car... And now I'm moving a family. So much stuff. And things. And boxes. And omg.

I won't have a built-in, or super-nearby, babysitter anymore. (daughter is staying in our current house with her boyfriend until they find an apartment or we sell the house and they *have* to find an apartment)

Sister won't be 3 blocks away to go on "hey! want to go for a run with me?" random run

I won't know anyone except my husband's ex-wife. We're friends, but still, that's only one friend. (not that I have a plethora of friends to hang out with now, but I have family here, so it's still different)

 

Things I'll miss:

My office. I love my little office. My color scheme and decorations just all fell into place and it's just perfect. I'm not going to have a place that's all mine in the new house and I'm ok with that, but I'll miss it.

Our peg boards in the kitchen where we hang up our pots and cooking utensils. That was seriously one of the best things we were able to do with our current house. We don't have much in the way of cabinet space and having them all hanging up make all of them easy to get to and it looked kind of cool.

 

Things I'm looking forward to:

Central heating and cooling. No more stupid window a/c's or space heaters!

Dishwasher!!

A HUGE living room! (Well, huge for us, anyway!) Plenty of room for Just Dance parties or Game Nights or *people* to sit and hangout without having to climb around each other.

A BATHTUB! even if it's, like, 6" tall... or something.

Finding Assassiny things to do. I've been to this town many times (it's only 1/2 hr away, after all), but usually only for shopping (used to have the closest Target until last year when they closed), so I have some exploring to do. 

[imjustarogue]

OMG. Closing on the house is 8 days away. o.o

 

We're moving in probably 10.

 

I just bought our new washer and dryer which we have to have delivered to our current house because Best Buy doesn't deliver them to the new house's zip code, so we have to do that before we move so we can move them when we have the truck and omg we're moving.

 

O.O

[imjustarogue]

WE HAVE A NEW HOUSE!!  

 

[tourennatrix]

Perfect gif is perfect

[imjustarogue]

 

[imjustarogue]

OMG Moving sucks. Tomorrow is truck day. So much stuff has already been moved over to the house. And there's still so much stuff left. o.o

 

Sister has been a tremendous help for me with the bebe and cleaning the house up. It wasn't filthy, just lived in and dusty, but there's no way I could have cleaned it by myself if I'd needed to take care of a toddler also. He doesn't really like his room right now because it's removed from where people are compared to where his current playroom is, but we can't let him play in the new living room because there's an outlet that's broken and needs replaced, plus boxes of non-baby-proofed stuff scattered all over... so that kind of stinks for him. *sad*

 

Last week, I adulted all shorts of shit with the water connection and the gas hook up and, yesterday, was internet (yay!), and this morning the car is getting an oil change that's waaaayyyyyyy over due thanks to the thousands of trips back and forth between houses. This afternoon is a dr's appt for bebe because of a bad diaper rash that just won't go away. *moresad* and then, hopefully, plumber can come to check the dribble coming from our water main.

 

At some point, during all of this, with all of the baby wrangling, I have to pack up clothing, dishes, pots/pans, bathroom stuffs.... and everything else....  

 

And my daughter (who's 17, will be 18 next month, and is staying in the old house until she finds an apt or we sell the house) just stopped by for her quick break from work and asked if we were going to be sleeping at the new house tomorrow, and when i said yes because our bed will be moving on the truck tomorrow, she looked sooooo sad. *supermoresad*

 

sigh moving really sucks

[imjustarogue]

Well, the first night went *splendid.*

 

The day itself was a bit rough around the edges with a pleasant migraine making any sort of lifting a joy, but sister was a blessing with keeping bebe occupied while I took care of prepping the cats belongings, and other things, for travel.

 

The first night started off as you might expect with strange new house noises waking the bebe and startling the cats periodically and just the general feeling of "this is new and different and exciting" interrupting a good sleep. Sleep probably would have been ok overall, except my brother, who was down to help move the larger items, woke me up at 3 to take him to the ER.

 

4 hours later and it's determined that he has a 4mm kidney stone. >.> Yeah. 

 

Then, about 9am I realized that I hadn't seen my cat since we'd been home. This is the cat who follows me around like a dog, comes when I call his name, and sleeps on my head at night. He was having a rough time with the move the night before and my husband thought that he had somehow escaped when we left for the ER.

 

Cue panic attack. Actual full blown panic attack. I was just about to post everywhere about him when my husband found him under the stairs about an hour later.

 

Needless to say, I was so happy. I started crying again.

 

His sister, who is usually the anxious one, is the most laid back with this whole move.

 

So, that's been my last 24 hours. And you?

 

so ded tired

[tourennatrix]

 

love you sister!

[imjustarogue]

Two weeks down. Right? Two weeks? Geez.

 

We're moved in minus a few items that we need to borrow my daughter's vehicle for when it's not quite so blazing hot outside. I *finally* have most of the living room/my office unpacked and figured out. It took a while because I only had one of my two desks for about a week so I couldn't do much unpacking until I got the other one in the house and then there was the whole "now what?!" with what to do with all the stuff. Since I'm sharing my office space with the living room which is being shared with a toddler, I have to be very toddler conscious which means a lot of the stuff that I used to have in my office will end up stored somewhere else. That's ok, but it does make for some decision-makery.

 

One of the fun things to come out of this is that because it's a new space, my office theme has changed completely. Previously, it was a steampunk-vintage-scrollwork-writerly and I loved my space. Everything was perfect and it all fit together perfectly. But now, I have this awesome built-in shelf along one wall that sits over one of my desks and I've decided that I'm going comic book geekout. I've got my comic compilations, Dresden Files collection, Richard Castle hardcovers, and several anthology books along one side of the shelves with my geeky Funko Pops and other figures and some other decor on the other side of the shelves. My walls are decorated with an awesome poster of Deadpool my daughter gave me last year for Christmas that I got a (cheap) frame for, a die-cut wood classic Wonder Woman (and soon to be joined by a matching classic Batman), and a wood X-Men comic book cover (The Uncanny X-Men, in case you were wondering). Above the built-in will be this awesome canvas Marvel character vintage wall decor thing, and opposite the wall with all the other posters is my minimalist Captain Tightpants poster. I equally love my new space. <3

 

The bonus is that our living room is sooooo much more spacious than our old house - even with my "office" taking up a corner of it. I have been dancing like crazy - especially now that most of the boxes are out of the way. Our TV still isn't hooked up - we have to figure out some electrics - so no Just Dance parties happening yet, but I'm cranking music on my computer and dancing as I empty boxes and organize things.

 

Clothes are fitting looser and my mom even noticed that I "looked skinnier, though maybe my pants were just baggy or something." I told her that it was actually both and that they usually go hand in hand and, yes, I am losing weight, thanks for noticing.  Oh, mom.

 

My shoulder has been throwing fits thanks to having to carry around a heavier bebe. I can only reliably carry him with my right arm/hip combo. I am super uncoordinated with my left arm/hip, but I am messing my shoulder up something fierce as a result. And there has been a lot of carrying bebe - out to the car, from the car to the store, store to the car, car to the house with bags of stuff from the store, etc. repeat ad nauseum for the past two weeks. In addition to my shoulder, my knee, the one I had surgery on a few years ago, has been grumpy as well. I don't know what's going on with it except it does not like it when I sit in the bottom of a squat position for any length of time - and sometimes I have to on account of bebe being tiny. Finally decided to call my physical therapist today and they were closed this afternoon. v.v

 

So... that's my huge two week update!  

[imjustarogue]

PT appt scheduled for Wed.

 

Sometimes husband frustrates me. I tell him that I want to check in with my physical therapist about my knee before I get back to any serious exercising because the aches and pains I was feeling, especially with the squats I'd been doing, did not feel like my "normal" aches and pains and he says "well you probably just need to do your PT exercises because your muscles are weak."

 

Well, yes. I do need to do those because I'm sure those muscles are weak. But the pain is not the same because it's not from the muscles around my knee and it feels like it's coming from inside the joint. So before I go and do any Zumba or BodyCombat or BodyPump or workout with weights or whatever, I want to make sure I know what's going on with my knee so I don't reinjure it. >.<  

 

Details on the my knee surgery. In the summer of 2012, I tore my meniscus, but I didn't realize it right away. A few weeks later, my knee was pretty swollen and hurt a lot, went through the routine with my GP of trying anti-inflammatories and such to try to bring down swelling - first over the counter, then later prescription. Eventually, realized that wasn't doing anything and scheduled an MRI. By now it's fall and my mobility is slowly decreasing because the swelling is so bad. I can't bend my leg, definitely can't kneel or squat. During the MRI, my leg muscles started twitching during the last pass because my knee hurt so bad from being held in a straight position, so when the orthopedist was reviewing the scans, he couldn't see the tear in the meniscus right away.

 

Being a good doctor, he didn't want to rush into surgery to fix something that may or may not be there, so we tried some more, different, anti-inflammatories, until Dec when I finally said, "Just go in and look and fix it if there's something wrong because I, literally, can't do this any more."

 

'Lo and behold, there was a tear. There was also "crab meat cartilidge" behind my kneecap which he cleaned up. But the one thing he didn't do was send me to PT afterwards. He had said that after a simple surgery like this, most people get up and walk away fine and dandy a week later, but I'm guessing most people don't spend 6 months prior losing the mobility in their joint. When he took the wrap off my knee the week after surgery and had me try to straighten my leg to walk out of the room, I couldn't do it. Literally could not. I had to take the crutches with me for another couple of weeks until my leg relaxed enough to straighten back out. And he still didn't send me to PT and I didn't think to ask because, wasn't he the doctor?

 

It took me a full three years before I could do a full squat again, but even then, to stand back up, I would still put most of my weight on my left leg because my right knee felt off.

 

And so, here we are. I have PT exercises to do to strengthen muscles around my joint, which I know I need to do and can help, but when I am feeling aches and pains that are different than my "normal" I don't want my husband to be all "aches are normal and you just need to do what you're supposed to do and deal with it" when what I'm trying to do is avoid re-injuring myself. *sigh*

[imjustarogue]

Time for a new challenge!