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One of the first dates my ex-husband and I went on was to drive to Springfield, IL to Jacksonville, IL. It’s a distance of about 30 miles and on the drive we talked about life, about what we wanted to be when we grew up, about people we knew, and about a host of other things. It was about 9:30 when we got there and since the purpose of the evening was really just to get to know each other and not to do anything special, we drove up and down the streets of Springfield for a while.

Continue reading Finding the Girl in the Fountain

There’s a new bookstore downtown Chattanooga that I’ve been thinking about checking out the last few times I’ve been in town. It’s called “All Books” and it’s right across the street from the trendy and hip bookstore on Market Street. We ended up leaving work early (i.e. on time) tonight, so I made a quick detour, found a parking spot, and headed into All Books.

At first glance, All Books looked to be one of those disorganized junk shops that frustrate me because I can never find anything because romance novels are piled next to books on WW II. Thoughts went through my mind about how I was too old to enjoy the hunt for treasure in the midst of the chaos and my first thought that my blog entry for the evening was going to be about how I’d realized the value of my own time, etc., etc. In other words, I was planning to write an elitist entry about how important I was so I didn’t have time to search through the shelves of a bookstore in search of something of value.

However, once I opened my eyes and shut down my snobbish attitude, I realized that this little treasure of a bookstore was actually very well organized. There was a printed sheet on each aisle outlining the identification scheme of the books. Books were in broad and understandable categories like cooking, novels, pets, etc. Each shelf was clearly labeled with a reference number. Once I figured out the system, it was easy to browse the shelves and look for books that interested me.

Opening my eyes and ears also alerted me to the fact that the proprietor was a very interesting older lady who knitted and crocheted and had beautiful yarns around the store that were also for sale. When I checked out I told her that my daughter loved to knit and would love her yarns and she told me to bring her in next time she came to Chattanooga with me and she’d fix her up with some new yarn. I also overheard her conversation with one of her regulars and realized that she was a competitive artist who entered her wares in regional stores. It was almost closing time, so there wasn’t time for me to stop and chat, but I walked out feel as if I’d almost allowed my misconceptions to rob me of a genuine encounter with a very nice lady and of the opportunity to pick up some pretty interesting books.

There’s bliss in realizing that I was able to overcome my misconceptions and enjoy the experience, but there’s also a sense of sadness as I wonder what other opportunities I missed because of my sometimes snobbish and judgemental ways.

Eating right while traveling for business is hard because I’ve got a license (in the form of an expense account) to eat out every night. Added to that is the peer pressure to try the wonderful appetizers, sample desserts, and have one more drink. There’s an atmosphere of joviality which makes it really hard to say, “No, I’ll just have this small (pathetic) salad while all of you are (over) indulging.” In days passed, I’ve gone along and let the social pressure beat out my internal pressure to eat healthy.

John’s heart attack was a wake up call in so many ways and one of the biggest was that I’ve committed to continuing my healthy habits even while traveling. I’ve also realized that if I’m going to be successful, I’m going to have to plan ahead and make my desire to eat healthy a higher priority than my need to be liked. The following are some tips that have helped me stay on the bliss diet while traveling:

• Pack food–Eating on the run is the number one reason that I fall into the pit of over indulgence when I travel and the only sure fire way I know to combat that is to pack food in case I’m not able to get to the grocery store. I typically throw a few cans of “soup at hand,” oranges, and sometimes prepackaged salmon into my bag. That way I have portion controlled foods readily available in case I get the munchies.
• Eat in for lunch–You have to pick your battles and I’ve found that saying no to going out to lunch is easier for most people to accept than saying no for dinner. if I’ve packed a lunch, even if it is just soup and a piece of fruit, it’s even easier.
• Hit the grocery store–Chattanooga, the town I travel to most, has an awesome grocery store called Green Life that has great produce, cheeses, and other tasty treats. When I’m in Chattanooga, I always head to Green Life my first day in town to pick up some goodies. I typically pick up cheese and crackers to have for breakfast, fruit, and other yummies that taste great and are healthy for me.
• Choose a hotel with a fridge and a microwave—Doubletree is an awesome hotel with big comfy beds, nice people, and a microwave and fridge in every room. Having a microwave and a fridge makes it easier to eat healthy on the road because I can store cheese and fruit in the fridge and have an easy way to heat up soup or other healthy food.
• Prepare a lunch box–One of the biggest challenges of eating healthy while on the road is making sure you have the utensils you need if you choose to stock up at the grocery store. I’ve created a lunch box of utensils, condiments, and other things that make it easier to prepare and eat food on the road. My lunch box has silverware, honey, a tea cup, my favorite Teavana tea, and a small cutting board that I use both as a cutting board and as a plate. I wash things out in the sink when I’m traveling. When I get home, I throw the silverware, cutting board, and cup into the dishwasher and then repack my lunch box and put it back in my suitcase so it’s ready for the next trip.
• Eat room service–Room service has a bad rap as being unhealthy, but room service has one huge advantage of eating out: you typically order your entire meal at once and have it delivered so you’re not presented with the menu over and over and over. I’ve found that it’s a lot easier for me to make choices when I’m ordering all my food at once. It makes me realize that if I have the gigantic appetizer, I probably should have a smaller entree and skip the dessert. Or I could have a small entree and eat the dessert. Making the choices all at once lets me create dietary balance.
• Mix up socializing and eating alone–Despite it’s ability to wreak havoc on the best laid dietary plans, eating out with the team is important because it lets you get to know your coworkers as whole people instead of just seeing the work side of their personality. If I’m traveling with the team, I’ll typically go out to eat two nights and eat in the rest of the week. I’ll budget my calories carefully to make sure that I have enough calories available for a little overindulgence at dinner.
• Improvisational Bliss–I usually stick some Ziploc bags in my lunch box so that I have them to store my opened cheese in. This time I forgot, but luckily the Doubletree came through for me and there were paper coffee cups with lids in my room. The worked great for storing my cheese and as a tea strainer when I forgot my special teaspoon that acts as a strainer. Since the soup was getting boring, I tried packing little cheese and cracker sandwiches in a coffee cup and popping them in my purse. They were absolutely perfect come lunch time.

Planning ahead means that I get to stay on track while I’m on the road and that creates a sense of blissful control.

One of the number one diet tips of all times is to keep a food journal and record everything that you eat. I’ve always failed at this for a variety of reasons: got bored, got lazy, forgot to write it down, didn’t want to have to always look up the calories, etc., etc, etc. Looking back, I see that in actuality the number one reason I failed is that it was too discouraging to continually write down that I’d eaten all the right things and still not lost weight.

Since I’ve changed my focus to controlling the numbers that I can control and not worrying so much about the number on the scale, I’ve been better about actually recording everything I eat. I found an awesome site online called FatSecret that lets me track my calories online, from my Blackberry, or from my new G1. The beauty of it is that I only have to enter the food and Fat Secret tallies up the calories for me. Much better than writing it all down in a little notebook and then having to get out a fat book of calories to tally everything up.

It’s been over a year since my Daddy died and a lot of that year has been spent worrying about my mom. She’d been with my dad since she was 16 years old and she never really lived on her own before. Dad made sure the house was taken care of, negotiated deals for new cars, and took care of other details of their life together.

One of the hardest moments of my life was in the funeral home the morning my dad died. He was being cremated, but my mom wanted to see him one last time so she asked the funeral director if that was possible. They brought my dad out on a gurney covered in a white sheet and my mother hugged him one last time and cried saying that she didn’t know how she’d go on. I took the funeral director aside and asked him if it would be possible to get a clip of my dad’s hair because my mother had loved how distinguished and silver his hair had turned. He obliged and made sure my mother got that lock of hair.

Ironically, the day my daddy died, my mom’s car gave out and she was almost overwhelmed by the thought of planning daddy’s funeral and arranging for a car. My brother and I looked at each other and knew that the vultures would be circling the new widow in desperate need of a car. We tried hard to convince her to wait because we knew that emotionally she was in no state to deal with the paperwork that a new car would entail and we knew that she had neighbors who would make sure she was taken care of even if we couldn’t be there. She insisted that she needed the car that day so I headed out to shop with her to ensure that she was not totally ripped off. She did fine up until she saw the paperwork with just her name on it and then the realization that the man she’d spent over 40 years with was gone, hit her and she broke down.

The past year has been more difficult for my mother than she’s let on and there have been days when she has wanted to crawl under the covers, but she has perservered. She’s learned, she’s grown, and she’s made a new life for herself. She’s volunteering at a Federal Fish and Wildllife facility by my daddy’s beloved Mississippi. A big part of her job is introducing kids to the wonders of nature and while she’s teaching them, she’s learning about he diversity of life in her area.

She’s also working and helping take care of the elderly and making sure that there last days are filled with kindness. The site of my dad laying under the cold white sheet was almost more than she could bear, so she’s decided to make small quilts that the funeral home can use in place of the white sheet to give people a little dignity and make it a little easier for people to see their loved ones at the funeral home.

My mother has also gotten serious about losing weight because, as she puts it, she no longer has the excuse that she’s cooking for someone else so she’s watching what she eats and she’s walking at least a mile every day. This summer she took us out to the area that she walks in and I was amazed by the steep hills that she regularlly climbed.

My daddy will always be a huge part of my mother’s life as she lived with him and loved him for over 40 years, but I’m incredibly proud of her for perservering and building a new and very meaningful life for herself.

Smokers generally take more breaks than other folks because they need to go outside and huff and puff every hour or so. Although smoking itself is pretty awful for people’s bodies, taking breaks from work is not a bad thing. I’ve started forcing myself to take bliss breaks during the day. These aren’t big, long, or expensive breaks, they’re just a few minutes away from my desk to regroup.

Although it wasn’t smoking, a vice actually led to my bliss breaks as well. My old habit was to stop at the gas station on the way to work and buy two sodas for the day. I’d try to drink one in the morning and one in the evening, but somehow they were both gone by one pm and then I’d be raiding the vending machine for some quick carbs to keep me going through the end of the day. From past attempts at watching my calories and watching what I eat, I knew that there was going to be abolustely no way I was going to be successful if I forced myself to give up Coca Cola, but I could make myself work a little harder for it.

I thought back to when I was a kid and we rarely kept soda in the fridge, if I wanted one, I had to walk a mile each way to the little store downtown to get one. I can remember making that hike in the hot sun, in snowstorms, and any other time I needed my coke fix. When I was in college and living off campus, I continued my habit of treking for soda and I managed to maintain my weight. Could the same trick work for me now?

Luckily there is a convenience store in my building, so I could easily make the trek for soda in a quick ten minute break. I work on the fifth floor so at least once a day, you’ll find me shlepping down the stairs and down to the conveinence store to get my fix. Usually while I’m there, I’ll buy a piece of fruit or cheese to supplement my lunch.

Not only does the walk downstairs remind me that I have to pay for those extra (and totally non-value add) calories I’m about to imbibe, it also gets me away from my desk and gives me a chance to stretch my legs and clear my head and that’s what I call a true bliss break.

Losing weight is hard work and sometimes it feels as if I’m being asked to change my entire personality and all of my habits in order to make my body shed the weight. I’m the type of person that doesn’t do anything without researching it and finding out the ins and outs. Weight loss is no different and I’ve always researched the best diets, the best exercise plans, etc. The problem has always been that a lot of them call for you to make a complete 180 in a short amount of time and that’s never been sustainable for me. I’ve always gotten disheartened and disillusioned and given up.

John’s heart attack has given us all an extra impetus to get healthy as we want to support him and we all got a sobering wake up call that the food we eat, the exercise we do or don’t get, and all of those other habits do matter and if your habits aren’t the right ones, they will manifest themselves in your body.

As I was tiptoeing through the web in search of sustainable diet and exercise tips I kept coming across the term NEAT and how people who were NEATer lost more weight than those who were not. Now if neatness truly does count in weight loss, I’m in sorry shape because I struggle with clutter issues. However, the more I read the more excited that I got because NEAT refers to Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis and as scientific as that name is, all it really means is building more activity into your day. A study by the Mayo clinic showed that a group of self-proclaimed couch potatoes who were NEAT had a healthy BMI versus a group that wasn’t NEAT and was obese. The study showed that the NEAT people ended up burning an extra 350 calories a day just through daily activities.

I got excited by this study because it shows that little–and very doable–things do matter. I started thinking about all the ways that I could become NEATer in my daily life and I’ve started putting them into practice. Here are a few of the ways that I’m working to build more NEAT into my life:

• I’m parking at the far end of the parking lot and walking instead of parking as close as I can to the door.
• I’m walking down stairs instead of taking the elevator at work. I work on the fifth floor and generally go downstairs at least three times a day. Eventually, I’ll get to the point I’m ready to start walking up the stairs too.
• I’m trying to walk more in my daily life by parking farther away from the door, getting up and walking to see someone versus sending an email or calling.
• Sometimes I’ll sit on an balance ball and watch TV instead of the couch. Although this doesn’t sound like much, the balance ball forces me to constantly make adjustments to my balance. I actually moved my computer to my chair and am sitting on the balance ball as I write this. My only problem with the balance ball is that it is actually too much fun sometimes.
• Instead of sitting down and vegging while waiting for food to cook, I’ve been turning on some tunes and working on cleaning up clutter while its cooking. It helps my kitchen get cleaner and me get healthier.

I’m continually looking for more ways to add NEAT to my day and going forward, I’m probably going to start parking down the block and walking home when I come home between work and picking up John, walking up the stairs at work, and parking even further away. None of those are huge changes that require massive lifestyle changes, but they are things that can help me become more fit.

Get your minds out of the gutter! The nine inches I’m talking have nothing to do with bordellos, porn movies, enhancements or anything else. Okay, so now that those of you whose minds weren’t in the gutter have slid down that slippery slope, I’ll give you all a minute to compose yourselves. A few deep breaths should help with those naughty thoughts you’re having and if you need to go and have a cold shower, we’ll still be here when you get back.

Is everyone back on track and ready to listen? The nine inches that I’m talking about are nine inch plates. After John had his heart attack, we had to listen ad nausem to the doctors tell us we had to cut back, we had to lose weight, we had to completely change our lives or John was at risk of another heart attack. Some of the doctors were nice about it, but others were pretty militant our need to ditch butter, salt, and all of those other yummy things.

John and I both knew that we needed to start eating better and we needed to get healthy. We also knew that whatever changes we made had to be ones that we could live with or we were setting ourselves up to fail. A quick trip around the Internet led me to some interesting stories about people who had lost weight by switching to a nine inch plate instead of the standard 10 to 12 inch plate that most Americans use. Many people attributed large quantities of weight lost to just this simple switch.

This sounded like something we could really do and stick to, so I headed out to Goodwill to search for some nine inch plates. They were harder to find than I thought, but I managed to locate two sets of four nine inch plates that I brought home, washed, and put in the cupboard. The next step was getting rid of the supersize plates that filled our cupboards. None of them had much sentimental value, so before anyone could protest too much, I packed them up and took them off to goodwill.

The first few weeks on our nine inch diet left us a little hungry and looking for seconds after dinner, but soon our appetites adjusted to the smaller plate size and we were full after a 9 inch dinner. I also started cooking less so that we didn’t have all those tempting leftovers around and if I did end up cooking more than two plates (or three if Sean was eating with us) full of food, I put it away before we ate so that it wouldn’t sit there tempting us.

I’ve found since we’ve switched to a smaller plate, when I go out to eat, I’m amazed (and sometimes a little disgusted) by the amount of food that is piled on a plate and listed as one serving. If we’re at home and eating out, I generally ask for a to-go box before I even dig in and if I’m traveling, I try to order something low calorie and mentally push aside anything that doesn’t fit on my mental 9 inch plate. It doesn’t always work and sometimes I get sucked into the eat, eat, eat, mentality, but I am making a conscious effort to watch my portions.

We’re still working on the other changes and some of them are easier than others, but for now we’re enjoying nine inches of bliss every night.

Many in the world believe in Karma, which is loosely defined as believing that your behavior governs what happens to you: you do good and good things come to you and you do bad and bad things come your way. Pagans version of karma is that what you do comes back to you threefold.

I’ve seen karma work too many times to not believe in it, but there are days like today when it is really hard to wait for karma to take care of the idiots and incompetents in the world (okay that’s a really unblisslike statement, but it’s been a rough day). I work with a group of insultants (i.e. consultants) who think they are smarter than everyone else in the company and who treat employees as if they are brainless minions.

Fortunately, for me there are forces in the company working against the insultants and we’re playing the political game until we can show them the door. I have a tendency to not play well with idiots and I’m having to spend a lot of time biting my tongue and pasting a smile on my face to deal with them. It’s difficult for me to deal with because I’m very pragmatic and like to plow through the BS and get the job done versus talking about the work instead of doing it. I keep telling myself over and over that Karma works because EBC went bankrupt.

EBC was the last moronic insultant firm we worked with and after 15 months of misery (mostly mine) we cut our ties with them and shortly there after they went belly up. They exhibited the same moronic tendencies that the most current thorn in my side is: arrogance, not listening, thinking they know more than people who’ve been there forever, etc.

So tomorrow when I go into work, I’ll be taking very deep breaths and consoling myself that someday very soon I’ll be enjoying the same karmic bliss I experienced when EBC went belly up. It’s just a waiting game.

PS: I know this is a more snarky and sarcastic blog entry than I usually write, but they’re really driving me nuts.