Life in a Holding Pattern

Everything going on in my life this week will happen in the last half which is a bummer when I have blog posts due on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Well, except for the “running of the bulls” aka the dash to secure RSVPs for all the senior hall events happening in September and October. (I should start calling it the running of the broads, but I’d probably offend someone.) I got my RSVPs in exactly at 9:00 on Monday but it will a few days before I’ll find out if I made it on the list for a fall color tour and in various classes for things like Healthy Legs, Perfect Bra Fitting, Making Soup and Cardio Drumming. The Life Learning Lectures are rarely full so I’ll have those to look forward to for sure---one is titled “Ghost Stories” and the other “Rakish Reeds Lake.” Don’t ask, I have no idea how a lake can be "rakish." Four of us Gathering Girls are trying to get on the same color tour bus, the first time we’ve tried something like that so that put a new twist on the running of the bulls. It’s a gamble, though, because there are four buses and time slots and one of our ladies was only available for one of them…it works better if you’re flexible making your RSVPs. 

The bra class isn’t a class per say but rather a 15 free minute appointment with a company that’s been around town for years. I’ve always wanted to do a fitting with them but I figure I’ll be under less pressure to buy from them this way than by going to their specialty store. I know several people who have gotten fitted there and they love the change a proper fit made in their posture, looks and comfort but it’s a pricy place to buy you undies---they even custom-make bras, if needed. Yes, I will have to get naked on top but I did it for a mammogram last month so I will do it again while trying to keep my mind off why someone would take on a job handling a different person’s boobs every 15 minutes, all day long.

Monday I was going to do re-con mission in preparation for the painting class I’ll start on Wednesday, but I decided to live dangerously and skip it. The woman teaching has a home and studio fifteen minutes north of me, out in the boondocks in between two lakes and anyone who lives in Michigan knows how hard it can be to find houses in "cottage communities." Google Maps wasn’t any help. Their Google satellite shot showed her living in the middle of a giant swamp with no roads in or out, obviously taken before the land was developed. I learned ten years ago not to trust those satellite shots on Google Maps when one identified my neighbor’s house across the street as being mine. The house numbers for the whole street were flipped. I was glad they were nice neighbors otherwise I would have worried about getting raided by the police---not a far-fetched notion. My husband actually witnessed that once where we used to live. A bad-ass, multi-agency swat team took down a large drug ring that lived across street even shot their two, nasty-tempered pit bulls which made all the neighbors happy. Don was tipped off ahead of time when it would happen because he’d been keeping track of license plates coming and going from the house for a month and was calling them in to an undercover cop/friend of his. Can you believe it, they were getting large quantities the cocaine delivered by a UPS truck and supplying half the city! Life is sure full of weirdness and wonder, isn’t it.

In the wonder department, I started back to the YMCA gym this week after not going for two. It wasn’t much of a workout since my chiropractor told me not to do any upper body stuff just yet. Basically all I did was break the ice by going up and down the staircase a million times, walking the treadmill, using the strength training machines for the lower body and wondering why in heck I’m still paying for a membership. I don’t want to be there anymore! I really don’t and it’s not in my DNA to keep doing things that are good for me when there are more fun ways to spend my time. And can you believe it, I dropped five pounds while the UTI and pinched nerve took me out of commission. I’ve never lost that much doing 14 day's worth of workouts. Silver linings, you’ve got to love them. 

Speaking of things you’ve got to love I bought a new landline phone because my old one was getting to the point where it wouldn’t dial out anymore---not a good situation for an old person who worries about dying in middle of the night when stumbling out to the middle of street and yelling “Help!” wouldn’t get me noticed. Oh-my-god, my new Panasonic makes my (four year old) landline look like a dinosaur! It even has a “block caller” button. The best part about the new phone is it doesn’t take an advanced degree in computer coding to program it. So even though I’m in a holding pattern, I’ve still had something to occupy my brain. ©

Buddha Offerings and Circus Tricks

Dog grooming day was Monday. Drop off time was scheduled for noon with a pick up estimated at 4:00 and in between I ran errands and had lunch at a curious little hole-in-wall Chinese restaurant that had a countertop filled with coins crowded around a tall, jade Buddha. The pile was at least five inches deep and four feet long and I’m guessing it was offerings to the Triple Gem: The Buddha, Dharma and Sangha although there was no neatly printed place card denoting the meaning of all that money sitting there waiting for a snatch-and-run robbery, assuming the would-be criminal came in with a large bucket. If I’d been in a Buddhist monastery with steel bowls lined up for visitors to drop coins in I’d know they were for the monks and maintenance on the building but coins on a countertop in a restaurant? When it came time to pay my for my lunch special of $6.62 I handed the cashier the exact amount and to my surprise, the coins went on the Buddha’s pile and the bills in her cash drawer. I wondered briefly if customers are promised good fortune if we add our extra change to the pile. The cynical side of me thought it could be a clever way to make more money---like coins tossed in a tourist trap wishing well---but the idealistic side of me thought something inspirational was going on that I didn’t understand. I may have to go back again and ask some questions.

The dog grooming salon is close enough that I could go home to wait for Levi but I don’t like being home without him. It’s too quiet and I can’t hear the doorbell anymore without the dog jumping up to see who is standing on the other side of the glass, an action that lets me know how much I depend on him to be my ears when my hearing aids are sitting in their box. I should do something about that---wear those Resounds full time or buy a louder, old person’s doorbell---but I can’t bring myself to do either one. When my husband lived alone he was a heavy sleeper and he wired up a factory break bell to a timer that he used for an alarm clock, mounted it on the wall above his bed. He could sleep through it but the neighbors from across the street couldn’t and after listening to it for 10 or 15 minutes they’d come across the street and bang on his bedroom window while having their daughter dial his phone. The combination of the alarm, the phone and the banging would finally wake him up. Except for the time when it didn’t and they called me, knowing I had a key. After a half hour of bells and banging he still hadn’t woke up and they were afraid he was dead. Fast forward many years later when Don went in for a sleep study and he came out with a biPAP machine and that ended the era of nagging him awake with bells, whistles, water and letting the dog get involved in the action. Just the idea of getting a louder doorbell gives me flashbacks. Do I really want my neighbors to know every time someone comes to my front door?

I ate too much on grooming day. A protein shake for breakfast, Mongolian beef for lunch and a hot dog bun filled with chicken and cheese for dinner plus two---count them---one, two bowls of ice cream with peanuts and chocolate sauce. Why do I do that to myself? When I cut my personal trainer loose at the YMCA I cut myself loose, too. The half-gallon of ice cream in the freezer is the first I’ve brought home in months and I can’t leave it alone. I have no self-control when it’s around. I’m cheating myself in other ways, too, like recently I figured out if I go to the gym on Sundays, I can count that as both the third workout in the previous week and the first workout of the coming week. I do like summer Sundays at the gym, though. It’s relatively quiet except for this past Sunday when a weird woman dragged a cycling bike out of the cycling studio and into the hallway where everyone passes by and she was singing every third or fourth sentence coming through her ear bugs. “Get it on!” “Yeah, one more time!” "I like it like that." I would have told her to get a room but she had one and gave it up in favor of being an exhibitionist. 

Most people don’t talk or use cell phones at the gym. Most people respect each other’s concentration on their workout programs. I broke that rule this week with Circus Guy. I call him that for two reasons: 1) He has red and green tattoos covering every inch of skin what shows except his face and, 2) he does this thing where he stands one-footed on a soccer ball while holding a twenty pound weight plate in each hand. And he does this for several minutes on each leg, then he repeats that set two more times! When I walked past him on Sunday, I pointed to the ball he was balancing on and I said, “Now, that’s impressive!” He laughed and replied, “Comes from spending my childhood on hockey skates.” That was the longest conversation I’d had in days. Woo is me.  ©

From Strength Training to Childhood Memories

It’s been a long haul, my commitment at the YMCA. Five months is the longest I’ve ever stuck to an exercise program. The difference being I was working with a personal trainer this time who kept changing up the workouts and I felt like I had something to prove after getting rejected from taking her "Move it To Lose it" class for not being strong enough. I freely admit my heart wasn’t into the workouts this past month and I wanted badly to be off her strength building train. Exercise is time consuming! Sure, I could have dropped out, not scheduled anymore appointments with Julie but keeping a blog helped drive me to see it through to the end of my paid-up sessions so I could write about her final evaluation on what I’ve accomplished. If I wasn’t a blogger, I’d have gone back to being like a toad burrowing under a log by day and coming out for dinner in the cool of night.

Practical differences strength training made in my life: I’m able to walk up and down stairs one foot after another instead of always leading with my right. I no longer have to seek out the handicapped bathroom stalls. Much improved posture. Improved balance. I can pick up the dog, all 29 pounds of him and easily stoop to do things close to the floor. I’m able to do my own pedicures again. I'm less fearful of falling. But the biggest change of all is I no longer feel physically fragile. 

From my trainer’s evaluation: I only lost 10.75 pounds which sucks but Julie says that I’ve actually lost 13.75 pounds of actual fat because I gained 3 pounds of muscle mass---they have a fancy scales that can tell the difference between lean mass, water mass and fat mass. I also gained two pounds of water mass, probably water retention from the heat, so using ‘gym math’ you could say I lost 15.75 pounds. You could say it but I won’t. I also lost a total of 20.75 inches added together from the nine places that were measured, my waist being the biggest loser with 4.5 inches. She was thrilled that "all my hard work paid off." I was surprised. She says I need to---get this---eat 300 more calories a day to lose weight faster. (I track my calories in and calories burned on my Fitbit.) On the test for upper body strength I can now officially pull 100 pounds fourteen times in one minute and for lower body strength I can do thirty-one wall squats in a minute. And those two achievements might come in handy if I want to get a job baling hay back in the 1950s when they actually used manual labor to stack those bales on wagons.

This week is the beginning of my unscheduled---or I should say my lightly scheduled summer. There was just one other thing on my day planner this week besides the above mentioned ‘date’ with Julie and I’ll write about my appointment with my bone doctor next time. I’m thinking about signing up for a cardio drumming class at a nutrition store now that I’ll have more time. I’ve been wanting to try it and few people know (or care) that I spent time in my youth taking drum lessons only I didn’t have a drum at home so I practiced by sitting on the floor and banging on the hardwood floor. My mother was a saint. Or maybe she had a good set of ear plugs, I don't know which. I also took saxophone lessons and lessons on the Hawaiian guitar, the latter of which I stuck with the longest. My brother took lessons on the accordion for quite a few years while I was jumping around from instrument to instrument. He got pretty good at it and we both played on a “stage” a couple of times. It wasn’t a big deal in hindsight. It was at a yearly Christmas party at my dad’s CIO union hall and other kids of its members took part in the talent show as well. I loved that union hall. I did my first political volunteering there working a phone bank on Election Day to help get out the vote.

What I remember most about being on that stage in front of 200+ people is the plush, forest green velvet dress I wore two years in a row. To this day, my younger cousin reminds me often about how much she loved getting my hand-me-down clothing. We were both sad when we out grew that velvet dress. It wasn’t that I had a great wardrobe back in those days---what my mom didn’t make came from Sears & Roebuck’s. It was the fact that my cousin’s dad drank up so much of his paychecks that they didn't have a lot. My mom frequently slipped her sister cash from her own grocery allowance so my cousins could eat. He was a mean, abusive drunk but despite it all (or maybe because of it) his only daughter grew into a wonderful, caring human being. She is truly a woman with a pure heart who works hard for her church, who would help anyone in need. My cousin’s formative years were obviously harder than mine but she married one of the sweetest, most supportive guys on earth. And they have so many loving grandchildren that she’ll never have to worry about dying alone and lonely. Sometimes the yin and yang of the universe can only be seen with a mind's eye overview that comes from our own longevity but one thing is for sure: German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was right when he coined the phrase, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” ©

Photo at the top: That’s me playing my Hawaiian guitar at the Christmas party and I’m wearing the velvet dress.