Dance More

January 30th, 2012

The morning began with one of my new years resolutions to “dance more“, to the show tune “if I only had a brain.” from the wizard of Oz. Welcome to my world. I was clothed in  a sweatshirt and more if the truth be told. Red, well more like watermelon, with all the washings they get. I held in my hands a bowl of peanut butter oatmeal topped with pro-biotic yogurt. Joy is a personal thing and it too is on the list after more fun and after enthusiasm. I refused to watch the rest of  Mary Poppins the other day as the one song I did hear, about women suffragettes is stuck in my mind for all time.

In out hour is curtailed today as Murphy is not fond of the rainy freezing glop on the ground. Lucy is in high alert  as the 19 year whippet barked to go in. She stood at the open gate glancing at it, like I did not understand that it was time for a walk.

Just as I predicted, all the guests up and left at the same time. I will salt the front stairs when they are gone. In the meantime they lugged all their personal belongings down the salt free flight of steps. It would have been healthier if they had not shovelled, there would have been something to grip onto. Weeeeeeeeeeeeee I had cooked my oatmeal and wham! Off I went to jockey cars around. The stairs got salted. The walk way seemed to melt, but not the stairs to the house. Go figure.

I had been waiting for a week, to put on one of the beds “perfect luxury seven (count em) mattress zone topper. A two inch thick mattress topper which helps to reduce tossing and turning for a more restorative night’s sleep. It has 7 distinct zones that vary the levels of support to personalise comfort from head to toe. Premium polyurethane foam made primarily from petroleum based components.”  I ran up the stairs with the box that had been stored in the dining room, where else ?  The topper  was warehoused in its own petroleum based hefty bag and sticky tape. I worked the knife to release to life. It expanded like the universe. It comes with a page of instructions in three different languages.   This 4 diamond sleep rated baby from www.Sleepbetter.org is supposed to aired to release the toxic residue, which I did not do as I like to kill my guests, saves on bad reviews.  It has a “convoluted (it clams)  pattern that creates channels of ventilation to improve airflow so that you sleep cooler.” Great, sweat calmly The three things in the instructions are AIR OUT BEFORE USE, DO NOT WET TO CLEAN, AND la PIECE DE RESIDUES, URETHANE IS FLAMMABLE. This gives the song “come on baby light my fire a whole new meaning” Wonder if they will take my own green status away.

At the same point in time I was watching the foam increase like my middle aged waist line, I polished the furniture with the orange smelling furniture polish.  I had anticipated polishing the fixtures during the snow storm, last night but somehow ran out of storm.  Little hint you can also polish the chrome of your car with it, or in my case bathroom fixtures. I left the door open to the room to air it out. Oh joy oh bliss. My sinus is now stuffed full of furniture polish mixture.

I also moved the furniture in all the chambers on the second floor, and vacuumed up all the prescription drugs people had forgotten take. While listening to the CBC go on about the new DSM 5 that is being published in the spring. The volume of psychiatric diagnostic started off as a list. The motivation to write the tome was the author’s mother was a patient of a Freudian. She received what the authored considered to be little if no assistance to get better. He thought he could do it help his mother with a list of enhanced diseases.  Hated Freud he did. (I do not make this stuff up.) All the while my mushroom of urethane is blossoming.  I understand it takes something like insanity to run a bed and breakfast but to stay in one? Must be some sort of wondrous  happening for individuals to forget medicines and prance out of here ok.    

Now I have to go and take the cardboard box that the four star topper came in downstairs to the basement to keep “just in case” I ever have to move it or me. The basement is full of cardboard boxes of things that have long moved on. But just in case I keep the containers.

While hauling out the wet laundry from the washing machine, I found a piece of plastic from the refrigerator that held a drawer shelf up. I usually put bags of milk on that drawer shelf. Can you replace just a drawer shelf? No I think not. One is supposed to purchase a new fridge. I need a new garage but that will just have to remain the way it is both until my fortunes improve, I am sure. But I have to say it did keep the bags of milk from running around the fridge. It is my own fault I should not have played football with the milk bags.


I received a phone call from my little sister. She is coming to help me eat the lasagne. How we are sisters’  heaven only knows, she has degrees in Math and a minor in Chemistry and can teach. I cannot add or subtract without the aide of a calculator and she would marry a man who can spell making it very intimidating to write letters before spell check. She arrives just before boot camp on Monday and leaves a week later. While she is here, I have to teach her how to drive a standard transmission as she drive a van. Just for fun. We could have gone someplace warm, like a beach down south, another one of my resolutions but she was determined to come and watch me sleep for the first laser treatment of the year. ( I have actually given up counting how many treatments I have had but it was every two weeks since August. Like one of those kids toys, that you blow up and punch and it bobs up again. I will check my loot ticket and maybe we can just climb on a plane and go south after all.)    I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much. ~Mother Teresa  Hugs


       

Another day

January 29th, 2012

I am confused I think I sent you a letter, with the incorrect date, now I losing whole months, not just days. For heaven sakes.

I went to bed really early yesterday thinking that I would get up and gobble some oat meal four hours in advance of a 10 am boot camp. No guests scheduled.  Here I am alone at the keyboard. Just you and me baby and the piece of plastic from the fridge I don‘t want to throw away until I know I won’t fix it.

Day two of water logging, and I did not make to the amount of water that I was supposed to consume I did however get up a lot thru the night.

I did not go to boot camp, no I watched Mad Men on TV, as I don’t seem to have enough of them in my life. Then watched Die Hard 2. The pandemonium, the violence, the bedlam, the blood, the guns, if you take all that out, the movie would have been 15 minutes.

We had after the storm, very spring like weather, walking in the park, trouble-free. Lucy did not have to perch to poop. A while back pre storm she was on a slight icy incline and could not get a grip ( I often complain of the same thing) and slid down the slippery slope while in a frog like position.  I was just trying to stay upright.





   



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January 28th, 2012

January 28th, 2011

Last night was full of activity in the bed and breakfast. Because it snowed on a Friday night. I of course went off to boot camp and played with hula hoops, and lived. This is not what you think it was. You are remembering  waist jerking movements and tubes of plastic whirling around. It takes training to relive childhood games. Muscles do not remember. But that is not what we did. No this was going to be much hard going. We warmed up doing stairs for 7 minutes in the arena. Then went to play with the hoops.

Stretched out on your tummy you lift you chest off the ground hands gripping the neon pink hoop which would become purple from my holding on to it for support.  Then bend said hoop in or out depending on instructions for two minutes. The other end was hoops on ankles and lift your feet off the ground. On it went for a solid hour.

Cardio was salted between. I beat my world record personal best at skipping, with a rope. That takes dexterity. I quadrupled my count. It has only taken me since may to do this. My quads from Weds were killing me and breathing which seems so simple when you are sitting around reading seemed not be a reptilian a response as I would have liked.

The music at the end was something I could identify “ the girl from Ipenema” I told my fellow worker-outers people that I had been to the bar in Rio where the song was first written. They were speechless, more to do with the strain of the warm down than my ever have been young, slim and had colour applied to my hair. I had told the trainer that I had not lost a pound, not shifted any sizes in clothes, but I could now lift up small buildings.   One of the women who teaches anatomy wanted to know if I took pro-biotics as it is mind boggling to her that I could be doing this much and still have plumped up fat cells.   Me too, you would think I would have gotten used to this by now.

You will be pleased to know I had a salad this week sometime, in my journey thru my yearly new years resolutions. I had written, but not sent some of the goings on about that, but they were just jottings on the page, as it were.

Given there was a snow storm forecast I purchased a ton of frozen lasagne and spring rolls. The latter is an example of you should never go shopping hungry, the former as on sale and now could feed a family of 12 comfortably.  The difficulty with the lasagne is that it takes about 50 minutes then 15 minutes and then another 15 minutes to cook.  That is too complicated for the first time cooking to throw in the oven pour sauce on it and head off to boot camp as I usually do.

The fancy dancy pasta may (I bought two) will be like the turkey I purchased for my birthday and took home to eat for Christmas. The stars have to align with the right time and enough people to eat it. The problem is what if there is another sale of something? I have all this stuff in super huge quantities cluttering up the freezer. If I cooked it according to the directions, I will be eating it for the rest of my life.

All this diversion to get to how busy things were here last night. Because of the storm no one left. I collapsed with a book I had already read, thinking I hadn’t until I got past the initial murder and mayhem. I hasten to add I had made several trips to the library and thru the new system they have to order books to have at least 20 books. To quell my anxiety they are  sitting in the living room.

I organised the animals and took five books to bed with me only to discover the most recently taken out was one I had read. I had also taken out two with about 1000 pages each, meaning to tackle them between bouts of consumption of bags of sugar and then alternatively bags of salt. You can never eat too much in a storm I say.

In my quest for health and beauty, one of the books I had taken out, also stated that you needed 4 quarts (American book) per 50 pounds of body weight. Incredible just how much toilet paper one can use in search of health.  Does tea count? I decided that at 11 pm when I arose to turn out the lights I should drink a litre or two of aqua sans gas mineral. (Portuguese for water with no bubbles.)  I was up and bubbling thru the night let me tell you.

This has led me to new resolutions as the ones made at the beginning of the year were discarded as fast I could write them. Now I have posted new mantras on the filing cabinet to clutter up the office. I also went around and switched the pictures I have littering  up the house and put  the cat dog in the kitchen in hopes of better “fen shway. “

I have put two pictures of me that were taken when I hit my goal weight for a minute in 1974 or was it 1975  or 1978 and went to Brazil. One of the photos has me holding my godson in a dress I purchased there and kept for a million years. He is now 24 or 21 or could have slipped into being 40.  The other is from a wedding and two friends, dressed in wedding ceremony finery. To fast forward thru life is incredible.    

My horoscope all week form a reputable on line newspaper is still yelling at me to get my act together with regards to finances.  I have vowed not to read it again until the fortunes improves.


Soon I will have to go and get fully clad to wake the kid who came in just before the snow removal people arrived clearing  the driveway at three in the morning.  I need his keys which I have not instructed him to leave downstairs as I usually do.

I will have to move his car as the other lady, who got up at 6 for a cigarette, and I got up too, to bubble. She is leaving for Boston today needs to get her car around his. Normally if everyone parks like they are supposed to, everyone can get out. She is gone for breakfast with her daughter and will return in time for me to make my breakfast and let it get cold.  

I noticed the kids parking when I got up to wish the  snow removal people a happy new year, when they loaded their machine into the truck. I am not sure they practice new years traditions as the wife has on a long skirt to shovel snow, so they may be a practicing Christian sect.

The car was parked indiscriminately.  I have to say I was incredible in getting my car in reverse in a snow storm around two cars in the driveway. Good or what.
So now I sit, waiting to clean, the second floor and then hit the books. I could go to boot camp but they make it too early for me to get there.   There is more to life than increasing its speed. Mahatma Gandhi  Hugs,








 

Egg Rolls and Bechamel sauce

January 27th, 2012

In preparation for the storm this afternoon I went and bought 2000 pounds, a ton to the rest of us, of lasagne and some egg rolls.  Both are sitting in my freezer waiting for me to cook the huge quantity of noodles cheese and béchamel sauce. Cook is not the appropriate word, this is a fancy way to express, heat up, but the corporations out there want you think you are cooking, because you still have to pay attention. If first off they give you a picture of a stove and what method to cook with. However you then have to  cook it 50, then 20 then let it sit 15. No where on the box does it say the total of minutes to cook, that takes a calculator. .So it is the super duper kind, on sale for the same price you need, so you buy too many calories for one person. Does that stop me ? No I am saving money.

I will eat it for the rest of my life because I wanted a change but I am saving money.

Lucy and I went for our stroll and I thought that it would be easier in the woods so
off ! we went to a 54 kilometre trail near here. There is a guide wire to steer blind persons, which I hung onto. Not because I am sightless but because I needed to stay up right. Lucy chased squirrels and other rodents of trail. We skated along merrily to the first fire pit. The trails goes to the left and we stood there wondering because there was so much ice just how to get to it. Lucy took one look and turned around back to the path we had just come on, and led me back to the car. Sometimes she is smarter than I let on.  We had a wrestling match, and she let me win. Her goal, is to get my thumb in her mouth.  "

... work can wait another 30 minutes. There are more important things to do. Like throwing sticks."
Big hugs,



 

Jan 26th, 2012

Tempus fugues, seize the day and all that. I was thinking to myself, yes time is airborne, I do want to do all that, seize the day, venture forth. But   Visions of canoeing across the lands, rollerblading in January, writing the next great American novel dance in my head.  I observe myself very carefully.  I waddled to the kettle  a vision in pink, turn on the kettle  and then hop into kitchen duty. The French toast cooks. I stumbled around cleaning, this is not in fact what I call an inspired life. I did re-arrange photos on sills while cleaning and bought red tulips this week.

Boot camp brought the bear walk. I am still standing but last night just barely made it to bed. The Bear Walk is where you lift your knee two inches off the ground, back straight and tippy toe forward and backward to the trainers inspiration. I threw a chicken in the oven and it was done when I got home thank God/dess . I sluiced the salad dressing off my forehead, from where I had lay my head down in at dinner. This morning when I finally got to have the salt bath. I know salt is salt but is Epsom salt the same as sea salt?    

I waited until I was extremely famished to go and purchased groceries for the biggest storm of the year if the weather person is to be believed. I came away with 2000 pounds of frozen lasagnes   I have been eating bags of sugar and suitcases of salt waiting for inspiration to hit, so this is an improvement believe me.

We don’t measure time in reverse do we. It is a month since Christmas  and the new Year has started.  I am just getting organised to do my resolutions for this year Previous lists are still posted on the fridge, Suggestions included, new patio furniture, which I purchased and is stored in the garage, that needs replacing. The other thing on the list is painting  the inside of the house, that only took 11 years. New car was on the list for several years, and is now complete until the next oil or lube job needed. Dance more is still there and underlined, and only gets done when there is an inspiring piece of music on the radio every morning. Mediate more will probably not happened as I go to sleep too fast only seem to do it when I get into bed. Mountain bike is on it and has been for a while but I hesitate as it means leaving the dog behind.  Various numbers list the mass I would like to be, all with exclamation  marks. I have the pictures of me at various stages for motivation  I am waiting for a career to hit me in the head.

I am waiting for incentive, stimulation, encouragement, impetus in other words oomph. Others seem to have it.   Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.” John Maxwell.

Cookies and salad January 23, 2012

January 23, 2012

The toughest month of the year is just about over, with the a close second being  the next one and the next one after that. No one complains about July. Just the heat if there is any here. Last year was so wet the dog got mould. Today is not a record breaker, but it is raining and going to a high of +8C. (the record was 16 at one time in recorded history,)

I missed boot camp because of the fall on Friday. Last night was the first night back in three days. Which may not seem like a lot, but it was swimming underwater. Slow and slower. It may have been all the sugar and salt I ate over the weekend while not doing a whole lot….  Well the fat cells are plumped up let me tell you. Thought I would give myself on a holiday.

I walked thru the woods with the dog, and that was nice, and I thought what would go with this ??? Hot C and I OFF! I  went to purchase it with the requisite cookies. My defense was thecookies were on sale. I walked in the door at the store and I bought not one but two boxes. Then a guest arrived, with a lemon meringue pie. Almost leading to a near death experience (mine this time) at boot camp.

I have washed the long underwear in preparation for the homecoming of winter.  I have to tell you wearing thick heavy sweat pants and baggy sweaters do not lend themselves to a salad, soup maybe. Today I am in short sleeves and what seem to be very tight jeans. This is in addition to is seems like my hair is getting darker, I am not sure if that is because I am not getting any sun, or if the shampoo and conditioner is not stripping the colour out of it, or it is dying my hair black.

The day was spent yesterday brushing Lucy. I vacuumed before hand as is my custom it seems. Then several bags full of fur  came off of her. She was tired of the tugging I am sure as I only did half. While she was blissful I told her baby story about coming to live with me and what a good dog she was too. She then looked for my hand and stuck it in her mouth. Thumb side up.  Went to sleep. Off I went for a nap too. Joy oh bliss, hugs to all,



   

Cat love January 22, 2012

January 22, 2012

I am not sure just what is sore from the fall or boot camp. Clicks and bangs and a huge bruise which would not have been so bad if I had been skating. Somehow you seem better prepared for falling when on blades.

Murphy lives. I have no guests, and a clean house. I stayed up to try and watch a movie at midnight, and that did not work. Murphy decides that I need to get up, as his job is usually my alarm clock. There is no on off switch with him. He did let me go until he could stand it no longer. The racket started. I know better than to try and rush him. He just goes places that are too small for me to get at him. I stagger to the kettle and push the button. After a splash of tea,  I look at him asleep on the coach and remember all the good things about having a cat.

A nap later will keep him from being hurt, hugs.