health & fitness 1 Comment

Turn The Beat Around

Now that I have a new job (OMG!), I think it’s about time to start turning over a new leaf in a few other areas of my life. Namely, fitness — both physical and mental.

I’ve been trying to eat better this week. Not necessarily go back on a diet, but do the things I know I should be doing, but haven’t been. Avoiding sugar and high fructose corn syrup, eating only whole grains, drinking more water, getting more protein, stuff like that. It feels like I’m running in place, though, or doing a one-step-forward, one-step-back sort of dance.

For instance: dinner was steamed cauliflower, homemade cheese sauce, and frozen salmon. When I checked the package of salmon, the fourth ingredient was sugar. Farther down was MSG. And I think I saw high fructose corn syrup in there, too. And here’s another one: we decided to splurge on graham cracker crusts for a couple of cheesecakes I want to try to make (that’s another mildly amusing story). When I checked the ingredients on those, not only did they contain HFCS, but they also have some kind of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Trans fats. *sigh* Of course, I’m still going to use them, and eat the yummy cheesecake I’ll be making.

At least I’m making a conscious effort to monitor what I eat again. These several weeks I’ve been unemployed have helped me pack on several pounds.

One big part of that increase is my abrupt change in activity level; I don’t walk at lunch anymore. I see that my new office building has a fitness center on the first floor, though, so I plan to see how I can take advantage of that over my lunch breaks or before work. Plus, we’re right across from Promenade Park, so I can go walking by the river or something, too.

Also, I had a discussion with Sensei this evening about my stamina. I brought up the fact that I can’t really go all-out for an entire 90 minute session, but I can do an hour. He said that it’s OK if I show up and only do an hour, then excuse myself. That seems like a pretty obvious solution, but I wasn’t sure if that would be acceptable form. So, I’m going to make a concerted effort to go to aikido twice a week, instead of just once. And if I have to either sit on the back wall for 15 minutes or excuse myself entirely, so be it.

On top of all this, I should really be practicing zazen daily, instead of once a week with the sangha. It’s so hard to make myself stop everything — literally everything — for at least ten or fifteen minutes so I can meditate. It feels like everything else is happening without me, and I’m getting behind. But those ten of fifteen minutes a day can make a world of difference to my mood and my physical bearing.

All this is a matter of convincing myself to do these little things one at a time, even if I don’t feel like it. Eventually, I’ll realize that they all make me feel better, and I’ll look forward to doing them.

jobhunt 8 Comments

New Job Happy Dance

It’s true: after being unemployed for almost six weeks, I have accepted a job offer!

I’ll be working in downtown Toledo, on the 12th floor of a corporate office building across from Promenade Park. I will also be making more than twice what I made in my previous job: an increase in salary of 114%, to be exact. Aaron and I will be on equal financial footing — actually, I’ll be making just a little more than he makes, to tell the truth.

The main thing, though, is that I’ll be working in the Information Services department, in Data Warehousing. The change of industry has to be the biggest benefit of this entire severance situation.

My start date is one week from today, at which time I get to report to Orientation at 8:30am. On Aaron’s birthday. Which he requested off from work. But it’s all good, since we’ll get to go to dinner together on his birthday. Yay!

So, when’s a good time for the Diana Got A Job Party that I promised you all…? I’m thinking Saturday the 17th, evening? Who’s in?

music 4 Comments

Rediscovery

Since I fussed with my iTunes library earlier this week, I’ve been rediscovering some of the music I’ve downloaded and ripped over the years. Until Aaron got me my 30GB iPod, I didn’t have enough room on my 8GB iPod mini to just add my entire mp3s folder. After he got me the new iPod, I didn’t really think about it. Actually, I didn’t think about it until I started running out of room on my C: drive, and needed to finally move all my music to my external USB drive.

The result is that I’ve been listening to songs I haven’t touched in years. Remember the days of Scour, around the year 2000 or so? When you could think, “I’d really like to hear this song I haven’t heard in years,” then you could go online and download the mp3 from Scour, over the web, with no fuss? I still have so many songs from those days.

The RIAA’s gonna come and get me. Probably shouldn’t blog about how many mp3s I have on my computer, eh?

Anyway, I have my iPod/iTunes set up with Smart Playlists, so I can listen to either my favorite songs or songs that I’ve just put in my library and have only listened to once or twice. My “New / Unloved” playlist has suddenly ballooned from about 600 songs to over 1400. Hell, my old mini could only hold 600 songs total! Damn. But I’ve been listening to that playlist for the last couple of days, and have been rediscovering songs I hadn’t realized I’d missed. Lots of Folk Implosion, some Catherine Wheel B-sides, pretty much my entire collection of awesome ’60s and ’70s songs (Strawberry Alarm Clock, Chicago, The Association, et al.), plus a bunch of albums I’d forgotten about, like Dashboard Confessional and Chris Botti and Dream Theater.

This is fantastic. Great background music for writing.

writing

NaNoWriMo 2007

So, who’s in?

I have Amy, Beth, and Aaron on my Writing Buddies list at NaNoWriMo.org. Anyone else I should add? Post your NaNo username in the comments, and I’ll add you as a Writing Buddy.

Last year, in 2006, I didn’t officially do NaNo; instead, I tried adding to my incomplete NaNo from 2005. I didn’t get terribly far with that. In 2005, I actually started a new story for NaNo, but petered out halfway through November. In 2004, I wrote on a previous story, but didn’t officially do NaNo. This will be my first year actually successfully “winning” NaNoWriMo.

(Like my positive attitude? Me, too.)

I have 1800 words written for my first day. I’ve figured that if I can write six pages a day, with how I have Word set up, I should get between 1700 and 2000 words per day, which should get me to the finish line in plenty of time. It also makes it easier for me to break things into 2000-word chapters, so I can finish one complete thought in one sitting. That’s going to make the month a lot easier to swallow, I think. My plan is to write several different characters’ stories, and tie them up at the end into one big overarching story of how things work in one particular aspect of my future society.

So, again I put out the call: who’s in?

genealogy 1 Comment

Granny (1911-1990)

Granny

The focus of this year’s Halloween Family History Devotional was uploading to Flickr a good part of the genealogy photos I’ve accumulated over the years. There are some others I have in my collection, but they’re more cousins and indirect lines rather than my direct ancestry.

This photo, however, is of my Granny.

I count myself extremely lucky that I got to live in Florida from age 8 to age 11, so I got to spend some quality time with my Granny. By that time, she was 75 years old, with a puckered, happy face and leathery, saggy skin from working in the fields for most of her life. Her hair was long and thin and nearly white, and she would pin it up in half a dozen small, flat curls under her straw hat.

I love this picture for so many reasons. I can see the family resemblance much easier in this younger version of Granny, and not just the patterns of aging in the womenfolk of our family. I also love the fact that she’s barefoot, with a dog barking at her heels.

And, no, she’s not pregnant. She had that peculiar firm-fat belly decades later, and her daughter (my Memaw) inherited the same belly. Granny tended to wear her pants unnaturally high, up over her quasi-beer-gut, with her shirt tucked in, as great-grandparents are wont to do.

She used to tell fantastic voodoo stories, too, most of which I never heard or remembered. The one story I remember, as best as I can remember it, involved a feud between two women in town. The voodoo practitioner in question obtained a piece of her enemy’s hair, put it into a glass bottle (a milk bottle, perhaps?), then peed in the bottle, said her voodoo witchery spell, and put the sealed jar in the oven. When the bottle finally burst in the oven, the other woman started pissing, and couldn’t stop pissing all over herself. The woman ran to the voodoo woman’s house, pissing all the while, and asked her forgiveness so the curse would be lifted.

I know my family tends to take these stories with a grain of salt, being that no one really practices voodoo or believes in witchcraft. Me, I don’t suppose there’s any harm in imagining that it really could have happened. But, really, you’d have to hate someone a whole hell of a lot to make your house smell like burning piss.

But I digress. Granny was always a hardworking woman who cared for her kids. She even faked Memaw’s birthdate by one year when she went into school so she looked old enough to go to school along with her slower older brother, to beat up the kids who would pick on him. Memaw kept that falsified birthdate for her entire life, since she had no birth certificate, and school records were the only proof she had of her age.

I know my aunt and my mom know more of Granny’s stories. I keep hoping that I’ll be able to get one or both of them to write down what they remember. I just know that there was so much more to her than I ever got to see myself.