Sun Baked

I spent the entire blissfully sunny weekend outside.  Every second of it.  I went inside to pee and to sleep, that’s about it. 

Saturday morning I walked my muppet for 5k first thing in the morning before it got too hot out.  I, stupidly, wore a hoodie and nearly died of heat exhaustion about half way.  Sweating out the toxins, I guess!  Ray was out at a meeting so when I got home I continued working on my front flower bed.  Here it is, about 2/3 complete.  I weeded and hand turned the entire thing and then hand churned in some compost.  From where I’m standing taking this picture, there’s about another 8 feet of garden behind me that still needs to be done.  Yipes!  And ps., landscaping is brutally hard work! 

  

The garden is going to be a combo veggie garden and perennial flower garden, I just have to get over to the nursery and pick up my plants, maybe this week!

Right around 2pm I called it quits, went inside and showered and then made cocktails!  Fresh mango puree into the bottom of a tall glass, a shot of vodka, then perrier, a splash of coconut water for sweetness and some frozen mango cubes instead of ice.  Delicious!

  

While sitting in the warm shade and sipping drinks we decided that it would be nice to have company come and share that with us so we invited Ray’s daughter and husband over for dinner.  I threw together rib eye steaks, a green salad with pine nuts, strawberries and goat cheese and some baked yams and asparagus.  It was so easy and delicious!  They brought their puppy over and the dogs played in the front yard until they were soaked in slobber and sweat.  Good times!

 

Saturday night I drank way more than I normally do and today I still don’t feel awesome.  I didn’t get drunk, barely even a buzz but the quantity exceeded my norm so my body is in a bit of a revolt.  Lesson learned….pour one big glass of wine and sip slowly! 

Sunday morning we got up bright and early, covered up the front room windows with cardboard and headed out on our motorcycles.  I wasn’t really looking forward to it, all of last year when riding I had high anxiety and really didn’t enjoy myself at all.  But….happily, I guess I turned a corner because it was like last year never happened.  I’m certainly not as fast in the corners as I was a couple years ago but I had no panic, no anxiety and was able to keep up at the speed limit or just above.  And?  I had a blast!  It feels like I just deleted last year from my memory and am picking back up where I was before my car accident.  So much so that I rode my bike to work today and really enjoyed the ride in!  I’m not going to get too cocky though, I need lots of seat-time so I’ll be riding to and from work as much as I possibly can over the next little while!

Ray is cultivating a cold right now, a week before he leaves to go up north fishing in the bush for a week!  I’m staying as far away from him as I can get.  I’m in my zone right now and I do NOT need a cold to derail me.  Plus, he can sleep with the 80 pound furnace that is our dog, I’m going to sleep in the cool, fresh spare room.  Alone!  (Ray was awake coughing most of the night and must’ve been feeling bad for himself because he invited Grace into bed to cuddle with at 2am…..and then she decided to lay cross-wise between us and I woke up at 4am hanging off the side of the bed!)

Happy very sunny Monday.  Wherever you are, I wish you the extraordinary weather that we’re experiencing right now!

UPDATE:  regarding the car accident saga, on Friday when driving home from work I noticed this “sign” on a lamp post about 50 feet ahead of where the accident happened.  Driving by you cannot even tell that there is text on the page and with nowhere to pull over (it’s a freeway interchange) a person would have to find somewhere to park and then walk back to read the sign.  Who’s going to do that when they don’t even know what the sign says?! Unfortunately the insurance company is being a douche bag and if the “witness” gives a sworn statement then they don’t investigate any further, they just believe what they say….because according to the woman I talked to on the phone this morning, “no one has ever lied in the sworn statement before.”.  FFS.

 

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7 Hours In The Making

I tried to write a blog post today………I picked at it in between taking advil for the smashing headache I have and putting out massive bonfires at work and now, 7 hours after first starting to write it, I give up.  It wasn’t even a very well written post and didn’t talk about anything particularly useful.

In a nutshell…..

• I haven’t been to the gym in two weeks and I feel that in every fibre of my emotional and physical wellbeing
• I’m getting my hair cut tonight which I hate doing but which needs doing and hasn’t been done in over 6 months
• I was in a car accident yesterday afternoon which really hurts my feelings…and Snowflake’s front quarter panel!
• We’re taking our motorhome on an adventure tomorrow whereby I will pack a picnic
• We’re going to climb a mountain on Sunday whereby I will pack the same picnic as the day before
• My exam is on Thursday….I’ll either pass or not pass. 

That’s really it.  I’m crossing my fingers for a relaxing and yet productive weekend filled with a nice mix of exercise, wine and husband cuddling.  I’m going to try out a new recipe over the weekend as well and hoping it works out well, could be a keeper!

I’ll leave you with this….a dog’s eye view of our walk the other day.

Packed Gym Bag!

Look! It’s a packed Gym Bag!!!!!!!

It’s sitting there, waiting for me.  Tomorrow is my first day back at the gym and I could not be more excited about it!  Don’t get me wrong, it’s going to be a bit different than what I was used to a month ago but I don’t care.

I have a sneaking suspicion that tonight is going to be the first night that I get a proper sleep and there will be my alarm clock blaring away at 4:30am!  I’m all good though, I have my gym clothes laid out for me and my Shuffle all charged up.

It’s funny though, I feel like I’m going to the gym for a different reason than I was a month ago.  Sure, I want to gain muscle to lose excess fat and we all want to be slim, skinny, thinner all the time.  But I feel like now I’m going because my body and the muscle that I did have built up and the core strength that I have been working on all have contributed to the packed gym bag in the picture up above.  Some chic crashed into my car and for the speed of the impact and the damage to the cars and my body, I could be in a lot worse shape than I am.  I think back to if this happened when I was pushing 270 pounds and how maxed my body already was, taking a hit like that and stress like this would have been horrible.  Not that this hasn’t been bad, but I picture it all on my 270 pound, pack a day smoker, unfit self and I cringe!  So now I’m going to the gym to help repair my body and strengthen my system.  It feels different somehow.

Anyway, enough about that.  There’s going to be a bunch of stuff still to come, chiro, massage, physio, insurance company settlement etc.  There’s still pain and lack of sleep but I’m drawing my line under this last month and choosing to move forward.    If a person is not to get stuck, forever mired into their sadness and stress and pain, they have to pick a point, draw a line and choose to move forward.  I have seen too many times, people have an incident or a series of them and never get over it.  I figure, instead of being defined by trauma or pain or weakness choose to be defined by your fighting spirit, your will to forge ahead and your strength to stand tall.  And then buy gorgeous jewellry to represent it all! (yes, Noelle, I exerpted my own email that I sent to you this afternoon…..it said what I needed it to say………I’m a dork!) 

Noelle Munoz is the jeweler and it’s definitely a worthwhile click to go and see her offerings!  All of her original designs are gorgeous (and I would really love some special spouse to buy me the “Rivers” ring), but I saw “Leaf” on another blog late last week and I knew I had to have it.  Leaves and trees are amazing symbols of fresh starts and new life and perseverance (I think so, anyway) and this piece is so unique and beautiful that I chose to buy it as a symbol of this and every other “line” I’ll ever have to draw under things in order to always keep moving forward.  Go and visit her website, she has some beautiful stuff!

I’m headed for bed shortly, 4:30am comes very early……….and I’m so, SO GRATEFUL that I am in the position to be able to whine about getting up at o’dark-thirty and going to the gym!

I’ll leave you with a picture of the new car (2012 Volkswagen Jetta) and of a certain blanket thief that I babysat for a few days.

      

Sleepy George

Admissions and Some Not-So-Fun Facts

Morning!  Apologies again for the radio-silence and many, MANY thanks to you who commented and checked up on me.  While I sort of stopped responding for awhile, please know it really meant the world to me!

I’ve been trying to write a post in my head for about a week now but I keep coming back to the fact that I feel like a bit of a fraud.  I’m not saying any of this to get sympathy or nice comments, it just is.  People keep telling me, here on this blog, via text and in person that I have strength and determination and that I’m tough.  I suppose some of that could be true under regular circumstances.  What you see right now though, that’s the highlight reel.  And just like a couple of months ago when I had to start sharing the failures and successes in order to be more real and possibly more relatable, I have to do it now.  So let me give you the embarassing, not-tough low down on what’s been going on.

Admission #1 ~ Ray is away for 6 days, he left on Tuesday.  As he drove out of the driveway I had an anxiety attack.

Admission #2 ~ I go to bed in his pajamas for some comfort while he’s gone (they actually recommend that for people with sleep disturbances, sleep in spouse’s jammies/undershirt so that you can smell him in your subconscious.  It’s supposed to be comforting).

Admission #3 ~ I haven’t slept through the night without drugs since May 3.  I’m frigging exhausted.

Admission #4 ~ I’ve eaten a ridiculous amount of ice cream to try and make myself feel better.  It hasn’t worked and yet I keep trying.

Admission #5 ~ In a moment of non-clarity I decided to cut my own hair (bangs).  Fortunately I didn’t get very far before I realized the error of my ways and my hairdresser fixed it.

Admission #6 ~ In order to soothe myself I drank a bottle of rather expensive wine.  It didn’t work and I ended up down a bottle and up a headache.

There are more.  I won’t bore you.  I went to my chiropractor (whom I love and owe everything to) and was bawling my eyes out on Wednesday because it’s been two weeks, it was JUST a car accident and yet I’m still feeling like crap, still on edge, not eating properly, losing weight (muscle, not fat = bad!) and not sleeping.  He gave me a few facts that explain a lot.

Not So Fun Fact #1 ~ When you get whacked in a car accident, your Vagus Nerve gets injured.  This is the nerve that runs from your brain all the way down your spine.  It’s the lifeline of your Central Nervous System.  It controls the parasympathetic and sympathetic parts of the nervous system.  Where that Vagus Nerve gets clobbered is different for everyone.

Not So Fun Fact #2 ~ I’ve felt like I was going to throw up every day since the accident.  It made eating anything rather unappealing.  On Wednesday I lamented this to Dr Chiropractor (I’d never thought to mention it before) and he immediately laid me on my back and pushed his fingers into my stomach just below my rib cage.  While he was “talking to” the nerves that run through there he explained that the upset Vagus Nerve caused other upset nerves (thoracic spinal nerve 10) and that they caused a “blockage” in impulse flow in my digestive system.  He does a couple maneuvers to assure the nerves that everything is alright and to go back to normal and 30 seconds later, fixed.  (I really love my chiropractor).

Not So Fun Fact #3 ~ I still don’t feel like eating.  I’m actually apathetic towards food altogether and that’s Vagus Nerve’s fault also.  Apparantly you can get to a point (after a decent amount of stress) where your Vagus Nerve shuts off the desire for food altogether in order to focus on other issues.  Apparantly it’s not a good situation and Dr Chiro has warned me about it.  As a former fatty, you would think that this is a God-send “condition”, no worries about overeating or gaining weight because you have absolutely no interest in food, YAY, finally some good news!  It’s not good news.  Your body can’t recover from stress, anxiety or injury if you don’t feed it.  Fortunately one of the easiest things to stomach when you’re not feeling great is fat.  And also fortunately I am a “fat-burner” from being on a grain free diet for 5 months and my body is accustomed to using fat for fuel.  So, I’ve been eating avocados and eggs, smoked salmon and coconut butter, lots of tea with coconut milk in it and random handfuls of cashews.

So there you go, the state of my world.  Now on to some better news, since there’s always good with bad, right?

Cheer #1 ~ I’ve been cleared by my chiropractor to return to the gym beginning of next week.  No jogging yet and weights at 50% of where I was prior to the accident and build from there as is comfortable.  SO HAPPY!

Cheer #2 ~ I’ve been cleared by my doctor to return to work on Tuesday.  I’m not sure how that’s going to work with my shoulder injury and sitting at a computer all day since my hand still falls asleep all the time but I’m so glad to go back to some degree of normalcy!  He was willing to write me off of work for up to 8 weeks until that nerve heals.  That felt like a death sentence and I opted for “go back to work and assess how you feel” instead.  Two months of sitting at home doing nothing?  Shoot me!

Cheer #3 ~ I am going to pick up George (Ray’s ex wife’s dog) in about 10 minutes.  He’s a good boy and I’m looking forward to someone to go for walks with for the next 4 days.

SUPER Cheer #4 ~ The new car that I bought wasn’t supposed to be in until mid June.  It’s here today and I’m going to pick it up this afternoon.  (I am so happy for that………….and Ray will be so excited, he’s out of cell range and won’t know it came in until he gets home on Monday night….Surprise!)

I have a post it note full of fun things and cool products to tell you guys about.  If I can just get some sleep and eat a frigging salad, I’ll feel much better and be back with regularity.

 

Not My Week!

I’ve been away from Ye Olde Blog for a few days.  You would think it was because I was off galivanting around Osoyoos.  You would be wrong.  Thursday afternoon, driving home from work I got into a fairly serious car accident.  It was raining and the guy in front of me stopped short for the guy in front of him.  Unfortunately there was an oil slick on the road so instead of stopping in time, I bumped his car (no damage to his vehicle).  Aaaaaannnndddd……several seconds later an SUV  rammed into me from behind at full speed.  Needless to say, I’ve been struggling these past few days.

We did go up to Osoyoos on our planned trip anyway since it was already paid for.  Unfortunately…………it wasn’t what it could have been.  I was poor company and incredibley stressed.  To add insult to injury, I got food poisoning on Friday night.  So if you’re keeping track, that’s bank account cleaned out on Monday, car accident on Thursday, food poisoning on Friday.  Nice, right?

Each day since the accident my back and neck and shoulder have gotten progressively worse until Sunday night when I knew I was in trouble.  I’ve been to see my chiropractor (whom I love and have so much gratitude to over the years) and I’ll be in to see him three more times this week.  I saw my family doctor yesterday as well and she wrote me off work for the week and wrote me a couple of prescriptions.

I haven’t eaten much to speak of since Thursday at lunch time, I haven’t slept since the accident, my anxiety over the past week has been off the charts (for me) and I can no longer tell if I’m having a heart incident or if it’s an anxiety attack.  As you may know, I try very hard not to consume any chemicals or preservatives…………..but unfortunately I’ve had to break the rules and last night I took a sleeping pill.  Sometimes you just need a little help getting over the hump…..and dealing with anxiety and stress becomes harder the less sleep you’ve had.  Vicious cycle!  Plus, while it may seem inconsequential given everything else that is going on, I’m not cleared for exercise except walking for at least a month.  That bothers me quite a bit…………it bothers me that some asshole woman was on the phone and not paying attention to the hazard lights ahead of her and slammed into my car and ruined my quality of life in the short term.

Yesterday afternoon we took my car to the insurance adjuster and they wrote it off.  It had more than $7500 damage to it and it’s just not worth that much.  They gave me more for the write off than I was expecting which is great news.  Unfortunately I am four months away from being car payment free.  What that means is that the Total Loss Cheque from the insurance company does not get paid to me……………it gets written to the car company, they take what they are owed and then they mail me back a cheque for the balance.  The trouble with that is that it takes mailing time across the country + 10 clearing days for the cheque + 3 business days to cut a new cheque + mailing back across the country.  So what I have here is no car and no money with which to get a new car for approximately 20 working days.  That’s a month.

It seems like everytime I turn around, I’m getting screwed somehow and I’m really getting tired of it.  My bank still has not returned the money that was stolen from my account, I have no car, I’m injured and I can’t even go and think about getting a new car for a month because I won’t have the downpayment money from the insurance company.

So, I’m going to go and lay down now for awhile and try to unchemically calm myself down enough that I can make breakfast.