But I have resolved to try to do things more organically of late, as opposed to trying to bend myself into compliance with the iron will of my ‘all-knowing’ left-brain conditioning (the ‘should’ thought machine that runs 24/7 in all of us). What that means is that I am trying to stop waking up in the morning and working out all the things I should do in the day to make me feel like I haven’t been lazy/unsatisfactory as a human being. Usually the argument goes like this: you should go to the gym/go for a walk/learn to bake a new gluten free bread (yes, I have recently discovered I’m intolerant to gluten, what a BITCH)/tidy such and such a room/put the new music software on the computer/make dinner/lunch/breakfast from scratch etc. ad infinitum. Basically all the aspirational things that would be great to do, but I want to get them all done in one day. Well, some part of my mind does, reality says otherwise.

So my new experiment is to let the day evolve ‘organically’, to let go of trying to plan and control everything I do in the hopes of turning every day into a useful or time well spent sort of day. What used to happen to me was that I would get so overwhelmed by the struggle between my unrealistic requests of myself (often I would be saying I should go to the gym whilst my stomach was in pain, so my mind was saying one thing and my body was protesting another and I wasn’t able to listen), and would end up paralysed, drifting around the house getting not much of anything done because of shitty feelings of inadequacy/guilt.

So this morning I have some choices to make and I’m trying to just do what I feel like, because really, the world wont end if I prioritise the wrong thing or feel afterwards that another activity would have been better. I woke up thinking gym would be good, but I need to walk (have started using my pedometer again to do 10k steps a day, great weight loss aid [among others], I’m down to 67kg from 90kg since this time last year, 64 is my target), also, I wanted to make dinner (long day in work today) and I was also thinking about getting my hair cut. This is obviously too much for one morning. But instead of getting upset or locked in a vice grip of inability to make a decision, I’m just taking my time and waiting to see what most appeals to me, in a relaxed way. It feels good!

I know this all sound rather neurotic, but that shouldn’t come as a terrible surprise to anyone

Who knows if I’ll last this time. I might, because I have set up a cool little den for myself here in the av room, nice speakers, little pillow wrapped in a red fleece for the lads to sleep on beside me (all are well and up to their usual shenanigans), Windows 7 freshly installed on the computer and the sun comes flooding in here in the mornings, it’s lovely. I’ll try to apply the organic thing to this too.

I’ll leave you with a picture from when I was in South Africa (maybe 6 years ago?), I’m moving backed up files onto this computer so…

Anyway. What can I write about? Exercise still going well, though I had to dial it back a little this week as I was getting kind of burnt out, psychologically and the ligament was making it’s presence felt a little too. To aid the psychological burn out I found myself a little teeny tiny notepad to write down the myriad of ideas that are going around in my head at the moment, but some kind of order on them. They aren’t particularly important things, just recipe ideas (I had a roast aubergine, lentil and wild rice salad from Marks and Spencer this week which has inspired me to recreate it), things I want to read, research (I want to start making music on the computer again and I think I’ll go with Magix as I used it before and it’s a nice cheap but good option, especially as they have a discount on the kit I want) etc. Often when I have too many ideas I can feel paralyzed or like no one choice will be fulfilling enough if I settle down to it, it’s a perfectionist loop in my programming who’s grip I’ve been trying to gently loosen this past few months.

I’ve left it far too late to write tonight, but I just wanted to drop in anyway. Photo’s from Sunday’s drive:

Ten years ago a friend of mine was turning 30 (I’m fairly sure at least that it’s within a few days of my birthday, my memory is foggy) and at the time I remember all of my then friends, who were quite a bit older than me (late 30′s, 40′s) (some things never change, huh? lol) telling me, ‘so, you just turned 20 and she’s just turned 30… it’ll be your thirtieth before you even know it, blink and you’ll miss it…’ I believed them, but experiencing it is a different kind of believing, ay?

I will say bye bye to my twenties this year, it’ll take a whole year I think, they were interesting years. Better than my teenage years, at times. My twenties was where I always wanted to get to, 21 in particular. Every year after that I’ve been kinda looking back saying, oh, how is it slipping so far behind me? I said back then that I would give up the fags by 30 (they say if you do then the effects are negated by the time you’re at the age that people usually suffer problems from smoking, who knows?) and I have. I also thought I’d have a mortgage and more academic education than I do (a masters, a phd? would I have patience for a phd though I wonder?) and probably a good job (I have a good job, just not enough hours of it) and who knows, maybe the academic stuff will come later. The house is kinda dependent on the job/money scenario but looking at how things are at the moment I’m kinda glad I don’t have a house to worry about paying for right now, or worse still, one bought during the boom and depreciated now.

So I suppose I’m not doing too bad.

I read two good quotes today which got me thinking:

“To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, and to be given a chance to create, are the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy”  Bette Davis, actress

and

“I have always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I have to be more specific”  Lily Tomlin, actress

I’m in no position right now (zzz…) to actually write about what I thought, so, kitties!

A very active day today, the start of week two of me pretending we’re much further into Spring than we actually are and adjusting my attitude/activity level accordingly. My goal is to go to the gym 5 days a week (which is where I was at before hurting my knee ligament, I was on around 3 before Christmas), I met that last week and started off on a good foot with this morning, doing my short set of shoulder/bicep/tricep/crunches and then twenty minutes in the pool. Tomorrow, muscles allowing, I’ll be doing the long set of bench press, dumb bell press, rows, chest flies, lateral pull-down and a little pinchy fecker of a thing on the ezbar where you burn the living days lights out of your Cardasians as I call them (Trapezius).

We had a meeting in the new library this morning (very exciting!) and I spent the rest of the day cooking (the diet aspect of things is going great too, I seem to have found my mojo in the kitchen again, long may it last). Here’s a few pics from Benny’s camera coz my little eyes are drooping… (click to open a slightly larger version which is sharper for some reason)

I made this salad on Sunday, rather nice, but I added a creamy tomato salad dressing to it today to give it a bit more depth

Usually at this time of the year you wouldn’t be able to see something like that because it’s normally raining and cloudy, but this clear, frosty, -5 shenanigans left the whole sky open for me to see the fading light. Very beautiful. Benny passed a father and his children yesterday and overheard one of the children say ‘it smells like summer’, to which the father said, ‘aye, better that than the smell of rain ay?’. Even the kids think we’ve rounded a corner!

I’ve started using sparkpeople.com since yesterday to track a few meals, have a rummage through their exercises and so on. I’m not a big fan of calorie counting, but I do like to track what nutrients I’m falling down on and also, I’m trying to get a handle on just how much I can/should eat to fuel my weight lifting work and continue to lose weight. I also want to track the nutritional content of my foods because I’m avoiding wheat and soy (whilst trying to incorporate some ayurvedic principles and trying to curb the acidity in my stomach, Jesus, I’m giving myself a headache writing this!) and with doing the muscle building work in the gym I want more protein/carbs and between these 90 million things, that means a pretty big shift in what I consider okay for breakfast lunch and snacks. I want to make sure, basically, that these new meals are providing enough calories and nutrients and similarly, that I’m not overdoing it on anything at the same time. I probably made that all sound more complicated than it actually is

One of the nutrients I’m watching is iron, which I’m generally okay with but I think I might fall down on sometimes (I think my fortified foods and supplements make up the shortfalls, but I prefer to get everything I can from an a natural food source), so I’ve started to try to take a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses everyday (good info on it here). Eating it neat makes me gag pretty violently (I’d imagine it’s pretty funny looking, it took me ten minutes to get through a tbsp of it the other morning and I felt assaulted after it)  so I went googling and saw that some people take it in chai, so today, for the first time in many years (how did that happen, I loved chai!), I had a delicious mug of chai with a tablespoon of black, sweet, irony goodness and some rice milk and it was delicious! Strange how something I dislike so much straight can be so transformed by the spices and the rice milk. I’m looking forward to having it tomorrow evening now

I bought my chai in my favourite shop in Sligo, Tír na Nóg (google street view). It’s a health food shop and I get most of my toiletries, essential oils, herbs,  stock, flours, grains etc. there. It’s quite small and very sweet and I love all the ladies who work there, they are just the soundest. I feel like I’m home every time I come in the door. I always drop in on Friday morning on our way back from our main supermarket shop to pick up my rice milk, maybe some organic greens or whatever I’ve run out of. This morning I dropped in with a HUGE smile on my face because I got a gift card for there off my Godmother for Christmas…I spent a good half hour pouring over everything I wanted, the kind of stuff I usually think, ‘oh! I’d love that’, but can’t afford I bought too much normal stuff that I needed as well, so I’ll have to remember the next time I’m in that I have about a tenner of gift money still available for splurging (I don’t think I’ll have much trouble remembering that).

Anyway, that’s enough waffle, I’m wrecked.

It’s to strengthen my medial collateral ligament and all the relevant muscles that should help it not to get injured again. I hurt it a little over Christmas with too much activity and had to row back the exercises quite a bit, I’m only getting back up to the full five a day today, hence the virtuous feeling. And the relieved feeling, every time I hurt it again I do feel like ‘is it ever going to heal?’.

I sprained it in August, too much running, faulty footwear. Yes, I said running, no, I never thought I’d be able to, but I had gotten to the point after a couple of weeks going from hardly being able to run a minute without wheezing to being able to run for half an hour pretty much non-stop. I had been walking and cycling before that so I had built up a lot of strength and cardiovascular fitness (just in case you thought it was a total miracle). I got in touch with my inner warrior and it felt really good and then I had to stop and that felt really bad

All going well, another month of the exercises should see me able to start back to running again. It was thought I’d be able to start back around Christmas (I started them on the 23rd of November), but with the ice and snow and a few other things, it hasn’t gone quite according to plan. So I’m hoping another month of lifting, lifting, endlessly lifting, should get me on track for starting back running again in February.

I did a tough session in the gym this morning (upper body weights, which is mostly all I’ve done in there since my injury), my god but I really am as weak as a kitten..well, comparatively. There was a guy there though who was virtually slack jawed when I asked him if he was using the bench press and then proceeded to throw myself (in a rather practised and fluid movement, I noticed) onto the bench and start my set with just a touch of wriggling, but little ceremony. EEE Gads! A woman on the bench press and she actually knows what she’s doing! lol. My ego loves it.

I am the only woman who does free weights in there at the moment (you see the odd woman using some of the fixed weight machines or using a low weight as part of some routine or something, but not lifting the heavy shit). The guys that work out at the same times as me are long over the novelty (they’re all lovely!), but I’m starting at a much earlier time now so I guess I have a few new ones to surprise

Possibly he wasn’t thinking that at all, possibly he was just thinking, ‘I wonder why she’s wearing a tracksuit top’. Most people wear t-shirts in the gym but I like to keep my muscles warm until I get into it (just in case you wondered). Nah, my ego’s having none of it, I like being the tough chic that shocks the dudes. Hee.

Anyway, I have more leg exercises to do now, but I’ll leave you with some photos from New York that I never got around to sharing last year. Also, a question… I’m not saying NY is my favourite city, but I did really love it (I think we all know by now what my favourite city is), so what’s yours?

I love this first one, I have it as my wallpaper at the moment actually. If you like any of them email me and I’ll send you the big version for wallpaper or whatever…

I had my warm water with lemon, made a protein smoothie (hemp protein, chocolate Sun Warrior, banana, dates and icecubes) to bring with me for after as I didn’t want to eat before swimming and I knew I’d be ravenous after yesterday’s weights (rebuilding muscle makes ya hangry) and off I popped while it was still dark. Had the whole pool to myself and had a nice soak in the steam room too. When I got home I made my new granola recipe (the ayurvedic one best suited to my crappy guts, loadsa cinnamon, sweetened with apple juice concentrate, lovely!), and read a little of my new cookery books that I got for Christmas (this morning I was reading this and it’s just gorgeous! Her writing style is so lovely and friendly).

Anyway, it was a lovely morning because I got off my butt and got things done, and it felt like, wait for it, the very start of Spring. Now, I know, where you might be there isn’t even a hint of Spring…but here, the other day, for just a moment I got that little shiver of change, that stirring of memories, that little whiff on the air, the slant of the sun…I dunno, but I just felt freshness, newness, the smallest stirring of it. I had been shaking things out from the window upstairs (catty hairs had taken over the house during Christmas) and the air was so mild, the sun so warm (comparatively, after the ice and crazy [for us] -15′s and what have you of the past few weeks), something about the light and the atmosphere (and probably the fact that I was cleaning), made a flood of Spring memories wash over me. It was a pleasant reverie.

For me, as for many people I know, Spring is a time of fresh starts, reinvigorated fitness programs, cleaning, cooking (trying out new recipes, being creative myself etc. not just banging out the old faithfuls just to have something to eat), being organised and getting moving again in general. I just feel so driven! What a great feeling it is too, if only we could bottle it. Perhaps it’s a result of the homeopathic remedy, perhaps in part also my mindfulness work, or just supplementing properly with vitamin D this year, or having lost weight/being more active. It’s probably a mixture of a lot of things, but I just feel so able to tap into that feeling of hope and potential and joyful possibility within myself that can be so illusive during times of upset and depression. So I suppose that’s part of the reason I’m writing again as well. I had been keeping a journal for myself for a while in October/November, so maybe I stirred my subconscious. In a similar vein though, I have been thinking lately about taking back up creative things that make me happy, so writing is an obvious way to do that.

It’s so good to hear from you all again too, thanks for all the lovely comments these past few days, they’ve added to that spring in my step no end

Hover over the pics for explanations…

I had a lovely time in the sauna and jacuzzi afterwards and a year long shower to round it all off. It’s a really lovely ritual that I appreciate all the more for my little break. A character from a book I read recently said that nothing could compare with that feeling of being deeply cleaned that you get from the sauna – I thoroughly agree and his sentiment often rolls around in my head in the hours after I’ve been when I feel so scrubbed and fresh and glowing all over (and warm!).

I’m looking forward now to getting really stuck back into the weights, a few times a week and adding back in the swimming to help with building back up the muscles in my legs (did I mention I badly sprained my medial collateral ligament last August and it still isn’t healed? long story). Actually, there are a few long stories surrounding the gym, the sprain etc. but not for tonight, poor Benny is sitting patiently waiting on me to start watching a film with him, and Millie wants her ballie thrown, so off I go.

We went for a nice drive today, a bright but somehow simultaneously dull January day. All bracky browns and sodden emerald pine and dirty grey-brown pavements from the melted snow. Can you believe it’s January? My birthday is in 9 days and I will turn 29. All I will allow myself to say here is that I can’t believe how fast my twenties went and 29 is not as invincible as 21, 22, 23…

I bought some mustard oil today, because my body seems to fall into the ‘Kapha’ category according to Ayurvedic knowledge of the body and how our diet effects us (it’s warming and this is a good thing for the Kapha type who tend towards water retention etc.). I’m looking into Everything on diet/digestion because, well, my digestion is crap. Full of acid, unable to process so many things, out of kilter generally. I’m back on a regimen of warm water with lemon juice in the morning, no bread other than rye, pro biotics or whatever they’re called and Aloe Vera juice, which I haven’t tried before but which kept coming into my head so I thought I’d try it. I’m also trying to eat more Kale, greens generally, as these are alkalizing and well, that’s what you want when you’re feeling acidic.

So, I better give the laptop back to Benny. I only took it to have a quick check of my emails and ended up doing this. It wasn’t so painful. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow, report on whether I did actually go back to the gym (the snow and ice kept me away for a few weeks after I nearly crashed coming out of it when the weather all kicked off first).

I’ll leave you with a piccy or two from Benny’s new camera:

http://www.mcphee.com/shop/products/Crazy-Cat-Lady-Action-Figure.html