Total Waste of Time
Mood:  don't ask
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Well, I spent an hour and a half driving out of my way and shopping for the ingredients for lemon squares, which, by the way, I made as recently as Hans's birthday without complaint. Kroger didn't carry guar gum, only xanthan gum which Hans is somehow allergic to, so I decided to skip that ingredient and see how the crust held. Then, they didn't carry the Spectrum margarine I've used for Hans for the last five years, but they did carry Willow Run Soybean Oil margarine. I have used this for Hans in the past, and it is made with partially hydrogenated oil--which I know Hans avoids but has nothing Hans is allergic to. The only other non-dairy margarine alternative was a completely hydrogenated product, which would have been great, except it has mono- and di-glycerides which Hans also has reason to believe he is allergic to. So I opted for the partially hydrogenated Willow Run and had made the crust when Hans walked in the door, opened the trash to see the soybean oil margarine wrapper, and refused to eat the lemon squares. He dragged out his list of forbidden ingredients, which at this point is three columns wide and three pages long, and showed me the word "hydrogenated." He insisted it had something to do with fermentation. A quick check of the dictionary and a call to Chad squashed that theory, and the best we can come up with now--aside from the heart disease issue which is not one of Hans's issues--is that it may cause inflammation and should be avoided by asthmatics--I am the asthmatic, not Hans. Still, Hans refused to eat it. So, a total wasted effort that caused an argument. I vowed, as I have before, that I will never cook for him again because if he doesn't refuse to eat it, then he comes back three days after he's eaten it interrogating me on what could have been in it that is making him sick. I hate saying I won't cook for him, because there have been times in the past--before the list exploded to include everything related to gluten when I went on a gluten-free diet in 2002--when I have spent hours laboring over something special, a birthday cake or peach pie, and it has meant a lot to him. Saying I won't cook for him feels like I'm denying him love, but I can't take the stress of it anymore. So maybe at least this means I won't be calling any of my friends at 10:00 at night complaining that Hans is insisting I stay up to make him a batch of chili (while he goes to bed) because he has nothing to eat for lunches for the week and he doesn't have time to cook for himself.

I really was trying to do a good, loving thing. Really.

Intimacy
Mood:  lucky
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I am so lucky that Tad is still my friend after all these years. We hadn't talked since my birthday in February, but after several months of phone tag, he called me Monday night. He said I hadn't sounded at all happy in my last several phone messages and he had to call to make sure his friend wasn't going crazy, and if I were, to make sure that it was at least just the usual flavor of crazy. We were able to talk for several hours. He told me about recent difficulties he had with one of his women friends that sounded an awful lot like other difficulties he's had with other young women. It seems Tad is capable of forming intensely intimate bonds with women, but unfortunately, it sounds as though the intensity eventually sucks all the air out of the relationship. I, on the other hand, am suffering from the exact opposite: intense neglect.

I asked Tad what reasons he had for telling me on my wedding day, "You chose well." He told me (all good reasons), and as he did, I remembered that he had told me before. He also listened, without laughing, to a dream I had had that morning about a former boyfriend. He was able to explain to me why that former relationship was the way it was, which helped me understand why I keep going back to it in my head, and why it's also not a useful model of a long-term relationship. There's a good chance he's explained this to me before, too, and I promise not to forget this time! I blame my memory problems on a highly developed corpus collosum--because I'm always zipping back and forth between the two hemispheres of my brain, I never know where I was when I learned something and so can never find the pathway back to it. You'd think, though, with major emotional insights like these that I'd be able to find a way to hold onto them. And just because Tad remembers EVERYTHING doesn't mean that I get to abuse him by making him repeatedly remind me of what has happened in my life and why this or that event is significant!

One of the reasons Tad thought Hans was a good match for me was because he wrote such amazing wedding vows (and cried while he read them), and, very obviously made me very happy in so doing. (I reminded Tad of the Billy Joel & Christy Brinkley situation: Christy acknowledged that Billy was a musical genius but said she needed more than one song a year to tell her how he felt about her.) So I went looking for the paper copies of the vows we each wrote and unfortunately they weren't where I thought in the Guest Book with all the wedding cards I saved. Which means they're with the wedding planning notebook I kept, and I don't know where exactly that is among all the moving boxes right now. (And I can't watch it on video because the VCR isn't hooked up to the t.v. yet.) I will keep trying to find them, though, because I'm considering asking Hans to write new vows with me now as part of our counseling work (provided we actually make it long enough to start counseling--last night he suggested that due to the crazy hours of his new job he may not be able to join me in sessions until December, and not October as we're currently planning). I read some articles online last night about the "maintenance" phase of marriage - the phase that follows wooing and the honeymoon, the phase you stay in until one of you dies or leaves. I have some strong objections to some of the articles' assumptions, and I'm at least glad that beginning next week I'll have someone to talk to about things like this.

In the meantime, I've decided that it might help me feel loving emotions if I engage in loving actions, so I'm driving to Kroger in Durham--the closest one to the new house--tonight after work to buy rice flour, tapioca flour, and guar gum to make Hans a double batch of gluten-free lemon squares. He really is having a tough time with the new call center, and it would make him very happy to come home to find his favorite dessert waiting. Wish me luck that Kroger has all the ingredients I need!

As If Your Hair Were On Fire
Mood:  on fire
Today's Daily OM message included the following Zen quote: Practice as if your hair were on fire.

Love that!

To read more, visit www.dailyom.com

Good Morning!
Mood:  on fire
Topic: Marathon
With the depression I have decided it's even more important that I get in my daily training sessions, plus I was still sore this morning from Sunday's long run, so I got up at 5:00 and went for my short run. When I headed out, it was beginning to rain, and I started out counting steps to get myself going. I know, it's weird, but it occupies my brain long enough that my body can get into a rhythm. I walked ten minutes at a good warm-up pace, and then ran three minutes out of every five for the remainder. The "runs" started off as shuffles each time until my thigh muscles warmed up and didn't feel jarring pain each time my foot hit the ground. By minute twenty, it was raining harder and I was grinning! By minute thirty, it was a downpour and I was running in asphalt riverbeds and having a blast!! The run portions were easy once I got going and I didn't overheat or want to stop early. The hardest parts were sticking to an even-odd breathing pattern (breathe in for count of 2, breathe out for count of 3--important because of my asthma)--the smiling made me just want to pant along--and keeping my hands cupped in a natural c shape--I kept wanting to flatten them out and catch the rain on my palms! I only passed one person out walking her dog and was passed by another woman jogger during my warm-up. Other than that, I was just passed by cars leaving the subdivision, and I just kept grinning along. It's fun to be the crazy woman running in the rain! I would have kept going except that I do have to get to work sometime today.

What a great start to my day! That was the most fun I've had in ages.

Chillin' for real?
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I have always disliked that Tripod's icon for "chillin'" was a pill. It looks, though, like I've come around to another place in my life where chillin' might really be the equivalent of taking a pill. I've been worried for a couple of weeks that I was hitting another depression as a result of the move and the pressure it's put on my relationship with Hans and my own personal issues. Last Friday I was pretty near hysterical when I called my mother-in-law to ask for her help in dealing with Hans, and it's pretty clear that this is not a sit-under-a-sunlamp or pop-a-St.-John's-Wort level depression. Hans thinks I've sunk pretty far in, but I know for a fact that I've been deeper in than this. The point is that I don't want to let it get any worse, so I called today and made an appointment to meet with a woman next week to get some help. She will have to refer me to someone else if she thinks I need a prescription, but I've never used medication for depression before and I'm hoping I don't have to start now. My first impulse last Friday had been to call my general practitioner for an antidepressant, but then I took a bipolar questionnaire on my health insurance website and that made me think twice. Anyway, research has shown that 30 minutes of exercise every day is as effective as any of the antidepressants on the market; the challenge is setting up a system that will get me to actually do the exercise.

I'm not looking forward to the therapy thing again. It is so hard and so painful, and the irony is that depression by itself makes it hard to get tasks accomplished and a therapy session can shut me down for a whole day. There were times in college when John would have to drive me home after a session because I couldn't drive myself, all I could do was cry until I finally fell asleep from exhaustion. And when I was in Seattle, Carron would always schedule me off on the day I was in therapy because it was like I was swimming in Jello and just couldn't keep up. So. Definitely not looking forward to any of that, and just a tiny bit resentful that I'm going through it alone for the first two months instead of starting couples counseling right away. I'm sure Hans thinks he has my best interests at heart when he says I need help, but I can't help it that hearing that from him makes me think Stepford....

As much as I'm dreading the experience, I also know it will help. It saved my life in college and it helped me transition back into "real" life after the Big Ride. I'm hoping it will help me move forward on some of my bigger goals, now that I have a better handle on what I want to do with my time on the planet this time around.

And I plan on being proactive. When I went into my first counseling session in Seattle, I surprised the counselor by taking in a four-page baseline self-evaluation that I wrote up to orient her to my situation and to help me determine exactly where I was in the depression (the bottom line: I was non-functional). Today I wrote up a list of questions that I would like to explore in the sessions, and made a chart of the issues that need long-term work and those that need immediate attention. I don't want this work to be as much about figuring out what happened in the past to get me here as it is about how do I propel myself forward in the right directions now. I may be in depression again, but that does not mean I'm in the same place I was when I was diagnosed in college. As in all aspects of life, you cycle through some phases over and over, but all the while you are moving in an upward spiral, so even though the phase has the same name, you are in a completely new space. I like this space. I am surrounded by good people and good circumstances, and I know more good is on the way.

Twenty Miles, Baby!
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Marathon
Despite the month off from training, I finished twenty miles this morning! The last long run I did was only 13 miles, so I added seven today (a no-no), and I seem to be recovering well. No asthma attack and I felt really strong right up until about mile 18, then my thigh muscles started feeling it a little. I only ran 1 minute out of every 3, but I still finished the first thirteen miles 26 minutes faster than I did them in June. I got up at 4:00, ate breakfast and stretched, and then made sure to eat something every three miles, and alternated between water and Gatorade.

The most amazing thing was that I actually had fun! Aside from the 5K finish at the 2002 Danskin Triathlon, I don't remember ever enjoying running. All of my self-talk was positive and encouraging, until somewhere in mile 18 where I said, "This sucks," and "This is killing me." But even then, I turned it around and finished on a high note.

I knew this was a pivotal workout. If I couldn't finish it, there was going to be little chance of me being able to finish the race in October because I'm running out of chances to catch up when I miss training. Plus, the 20 mile mark signifies some kind of barrier in my mind. Once I've done 20, I don't see any reason why I won't finish 26. (I have heard, though, that the last six miles feel completely different than the first twenty.) I need to work on speed now. I need to be able to maintain a 14-minute per mile pace for the first 20 miles in order to avoid being bussed over a portion of the course once one of the bridges opens to traffic. That, more than finishing, is going to be the real challenge.

Overall, I would call today a really successful day!

Properly Chastened
Mood:  lazy
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Six days after my post about the other shoe dropping, Daily Om sent this to my inbox. Of course, I didn't read it until today.

Peace.

Back in the Saddle
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Marathon
Without meaning to, I took the month of July off from training. As long as I was living at the old place, I continued walking and running, but as soon as I started spending most of my nights here, the workouts ended. For the past five weeks, I have been trying to work full time and be at two houses at once and have had no extra energy or time for anything but dealing with my life.

But today is the first day of August, I'm moved completely out of the old place, the new place is coming together, at the moment Hans and I have found a way to live together in a tentative peace, and I got up at 5:00 and walked for an hour. My right arch was a little surprised and cranky, but the movement felt good. Almost as good as pedaling. I have three months of training left before the marathon, and there's no more wiggle room left in the schedule. I have to be serious from here on in.

I have a weightlifting workout scheduled for this afternoon and my first run tomorrow morning at 5:00. I'll probably post after each workout for awhile just to give myself incentive to stick to the schedule. Positive reinforcement and all that....

Sewer Saves Emperor's Head
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Daily Eruptions
How's that for a headline? I probably won't get any paying gigs writing headlines any time soon, but you have to admit, that caught your attention.

Here's the AP story: http://enews.earthlink.net/article/ent?guid=20050728/42e85840_3ca6_1552620050728550293876.

Cool, eh?

All About the Bike
Mood:  caffeinated
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I took a "vacation" day yesterday to finish getting the leftover packing boxes and the six 30 gallon trash bags of packing peanuts out of the townhouse in Wake Forest and to get the place cleaned up for the new tenants. I am exhausted. My right hand scrubbed every surface in the place and today will hardly move!

The weird thing is that, despite the soreness in my upper body and the lethargy everywhere else, the thing I really wish I could do today is jump on the Stellar for a ninety-mile solo ride. I can almost feel the need to pedal in my legs! Maybe the overall tiredness I feel reminds my body of what it felt like to ride the bike across country, and somehow my body has decided that's what I'm doing and is sending my brain signals to go air up the tires and get out on the road.

Ninety miles in Idaho or Minnesota or Wisconsin or Michigan's Upper Peninsula would be so perfect today. Along one of the Great Lakes, or the Mississippi River, or along a coast... But I would settle for just being on the bike alone anywhere (except maybe Illinois around Chicago or that really busy stretch along that highway in Pennsylvania the Big Ride attempted).

I promised myself this morning that if I live through the marathon in October, next fall I'll do the week-long Cycle North Carolina event that goes from the mountains to the coast. I miss eating breakfast outdoors with hundreds of people dressed in Spandex and CoolMax!