racheldirollzack.com

Don’t think I don’t realize the fact that I’ve been neglecting this blog lately only to post about dead folkses. More actual content coming soon, maybe. I’d like to promise but… you know how these things get.

So I’ve been processing this whole Michael Jackson thing, and other people have said it better than I could. Basically, if you were born around 1975 or earlier, Michael Jackson was IT. He was EVERYTHING in the 80’s. Yeah, he turned into something so ‘other’ that it can barely be explained, but for me, in elementary school, MJ was MUSIC.

But today Billy Mays died. To me, that’s just a huge, huge shock. Sure, MJ dying at 50 was shocking, but with the way that dude was carrying on, it was really only a matter of time. With Billy Mays, well, we expected him to be on our TVs for a good long time, hawking OxiClean and Orange Glo and Slider Station and a hundred other things. Wonder Mop (I do want one of these).

When Jillian was a tiny tiny baby and we were having marathon breastfeeding sessions, Billy Mays was there for me. He was there at 3:30AM, shouting about Orange Glo or some other thing that I just HAD to have. Even though the TV in Jillian’s nursery was hooked to the cable, we didn’t have a converter box for it so I only got about 20 channels on it. We had to watch a lot of network dreck in those days. But Billy was always there. His yelly presence was the music to which we drowsed, in those late nights/early mornings.

And now he’s gone. Limited time offer, my friends.

Farrah Fawcett’s death today was not a surprise. Everyone could see that she was on her way out, and it’s great that she’s not suffering anymore.

Michael Jackson, on the other hand… SHOCKING. Seriously shocking. Crazy! I’m going to sew sequins on all my clothes in tribute. And maybe schedule some plastic surgery.

We are potty-training Jillian. She is in underpants most of the day (aside from naptime and bedtime and if I’m at the gym, since the gym’s babysitting service doesn’t mess with that). Pee accidents have been minimal, and we have had a few successful poops in the potty, but for the most part, she waits until a diaper appears and unloads into that.

Usually.

Yesterday, she actually announced that she had to poop, so I put her on the potty. Ten minutes later, nothing had happened so I took her off. I was on the phone trying to schedule an inspection for the car and Jillian disappeared for a bit. Pretty much as soon as I hung up, she reappeared, all upset because she’d gone in her pants.

Sigh.

I know it makes her uncomfortable because she was really upset, but she won’t calm down enough for me to get her undressed in such a way that we don’t get poop EVERYWHERE. Including in my hand.

I’m not a girly girl. Not remotely. I own some makeup, but I couldn’t tell you where it is. My hair… we’re having a rough patch at the moment and I’m thinking of breaking up with it. Counseling might be in order before I decide to do something drastic and chop it all off.

I do like to paint my nails, though. Even in this respect, I’m barely girly - I have 2 shades of red, 2 shades of blue, a sparkly black, a deep burgundy color that looks like dried blood, a weird silvery-lavender, some kind of weird magenta with purple overtones that make my hands look like Tranny Hands, emerald green, and two shades of freakout pink that Jillian picked out. This is what my dad gets for objecting to purple nail polish when I was ten.

The nail polish I favor is the Sally Hansen X-treme Wear kind, since I do a lot of hard work with my hands and I like my nails to stay painted for longer than it takes for them to dry. However, nail polish is no match for gardening, it would seem. Which means the polish I put on my claws Friday afternoon is pretty much destroyed.

The garden looks good, though.

After a week off due to illness and car troubles, my trainer and I were able to meet again on Tuesday. I don’t feel like she’s killing me anymore, and I’m getting better at pushing my own limits and not being a pussy when things start to get too hard. I would be the biggest slacker ever, if I felt like it, and so this is sort of hard for me.

I am seeing results, though. I’m definitely feeling the results, which is motivation enough to keep me going. I have a goal and I WILL REACH IT.

The thing is, I don’t know how much I weigh. I know what I weighed when I started this a month ago (218 *barf*), but between the wacky scale at the gym and my craptastical scale here at home, I don’t know what I weigh at present. I’m okay with this, I think. I’m just girly enough to get obsessed with the number instead of how I feel or what my clothes are up to, so maybe it’s best that I just don’t have a scale that I can really rely on.

My eating habits are improving. I’ve always ate fairly well (whole-ish foods, etc), but dairy and sweets are my downfall. So I’m gradually reducing the amount of dairy in my life [sob] and the sweets thing will be easy since it’s nearly summer and that means fruit.

A lot of people I know do Weight Watchers and they SWEAR by it, but I’ve done it and it didn’t work for me. I could never get past the annoyance at being talked to like I was some kind of imbecile. You mean grilled chicken is better for you than fried? GET OUT OF TOWN! Stuff like that, which is so… *duuuuh* but was like some kind of Moses-bringing-down-the-tablets to some people. I could never get past thinking “well NO WONDER you’re a fat-ass if this is news to you!” And I don’t like feeling that way all the time.

Yes, I’ll pause while you die laughing.

So, WW was never my thing. Aside from the Common Sense 101 feeling of the meetings, the heavy insistence on low-fat this and fat-free that bothered me, too. Low-fat cheese? Sure, occasionally. But not as a way of life. Fat-free cheese? HELL. NO. It doesn’t TASTE like anything. I’d rather have a small bit of full-fat cheese that actually tastes like food than a whole plate of fat-free plastic shit that doesn’t resemble cheese in anything but appearance, and usually not even then.

So, people say that WW teaches you how to eat. Sure, maybe it does. There is some talk about portion sizes and food-pyramid balance, but… at the end of the day, I was always feeling a bit deprived because low-fat/fat-free food doesn’t taste good at all. And there’s a REASON why Weight Watchers is a multi-million dollar enterprise: if it worked as well as it says it does, they’d put themselves out of business.

It comes down to math, in the end. Calories in/calories out. Less of one, more of the other. I’m getting there.

Had a bit of a problem earlier, but thanks to the magic that is Mike Hanley, it appears to be fixed. Please everyone send your single female ladies to Austin, Texas so Mike can ply them with queso.

Yesterday, I had my first session with my personal trainer. I am paying this woman $40/hour to make me do horrible horrible things. Like squats. And leg extensions. And biceps curls. And my nemesis: triceps dips.


This has been a long time coming.

It used to be so easy. If I were somehow gifted with the body I had when I was 17, oh, how I would take care of it. I wouldn’t let it get to the point I am at now, which is… an unhappy place.

See, here’s the thing. I’m okay with myself on the inside. I don’t think I look all that horrible (and yes, compared to some other people, I’m practically Kate Moss). But then I see myself in pictures or a full-length mirror and I’m horrified at what I’m seeing. I need to make my outside match what I feel inside, and a trainer is the way to go.

It was gradual, this weight gain. First I quit my job at Borders, where I drank coffee like water and was on my feet most of the day. I got a desk job and a crazy-amount of stress to go with it (very little of which was related to the job - it was the physical environment I found myself in, but that’s a story for another day). I got out of that job and jumped into another one with a similar amount of stress (though that was a personality conflict, and I swear if I ever see that woman on the street I will be hard-pressed not to hit her with my truck. Horrible woman). Went on anxiety meds around that time, which did help a bit, but also caused me to… gain weight.

But it was gradual. My pants went from size 10 to a stop at 12, then a sojourn in the 14’s (with a brief foray into the wonderful world of maternity pants) and now… I’m around a size 16. This is completely and totally unacceptable to me.

I’m finally at the point where I need to do something about it. I know myself well enough to know that I can’t do it on my own. At least, not at first. I need someone pushing me, getting me past that initial painful stage and then I hope to have enough momentum to keep doing it on my own.

I want to be able to keep up with The Jillian. I’d like to eventually go for a run with Freddie and not feel like I’m going to die. And the very crazy part of me wants to run a marathon, specifically NYC. That is probably not going to happen until 2011, but it’s a shimmery sort of goal, so we’ll see if it comes into clearer focus as we progress.

I am pissed off at myself for letting it get to this point. I was watching in the mirror as I was lifting weights yesterday and I was just disgusted with what I saw. That is NOT what I look like. But it IS, and that’s the problem. So I’m fixing it.

1. I have a headache. This used to be my normal state of being, but ever since I got knocked up and had Jillian, the daily headaches have gone away. I haven’t had a full-blown migraine since December 2005! But I’ve been doing a lot of reading and knitting lately so maybe that’s the culprit. I’ve also noticed that once I get past the headache stage of caffeine withdrawal, I’m fine until I have a cup of coffee and then that causes a headache. I cannot win.

2. Old friends coming out of the woodwork on Facebook. It’s interesting to interact with people I haven’t seen in years. When you fall out of touch with someone, you’re left with your last impression of them which sort of crystallizes in your mind. So to come across these people again is interesting because we all know who we think we all are, but we’ve all changed a lot and getting to know the old friends again is a lot of fun. I mean, I’ve had three different personalities (at least!) since I graduated from high school!

3. I do believe it’s going to rain from now until August. I will have to get the tomatoes in the ground at some point. I hope they survive. We had a little incident in which the seedling tray was overturned and a lot of the seedlings didn’t make it but what the hell was I going to do with 72 tomato plants anyway? I think I have about 20 good ones, and that will be more than enough.

4. The rest of the garden is looking amazing. Lettuce and spinach are up, the scallions are poking green arms out of the soil in a very tentative way, and the cucumbers are looking good. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll be more successful than we have been. I have oregano and basil on the windowsill (so I don’t forget about them), and someday I’ll get around to planting my cilantro. Maybe.

5. We finally acquired a boombox for our Sirius radio. They don’t even make the unit we own anymore, so it was ebay to the rescue. For $70, we got the boombox thingy and now we can listen to the radio outside on the patio! If the rain ever stops, that is.

6. We are planning to have a yard sale in a couple of weeks. I don’t know how we’ve managed to acquire so much junk just in the 18 months since we last moved (and pitched a ton of crap then), but we’ve got quite a bit. I’ve been saving the boxes that Jillian’s diapers come in and putting her outgrown clothes in them. There were 10 of them in her closet, all packed to the gills. I hope we can sell some of it! I think I might put the couch and loveseat up for sale at the same time and see if any poor bastard wants to take them off our hands.

7. Domestic goddess alert: Jillian is testing her limits lately, and the other day this took the form of pitching a full glass of milk onto the carpet. As you can imagine, this did not make Mama happy, but in a way it totally did because we went out and bought ourselves a steam cleaner for the carpet. I call it “The Beast” and damn, if that’s not the best $250 I’ve spent lately. I figured I could buy one of these for $250 and spend a few hours every few months cleaning the carpet myself or I could spend at least $250 for Stanley Steemer or their generic local counterpart to come out and do it. Since we’ve only had the carpet cleaners here one time since we moved in, you can imagine how low on the budget list carpet cleaning ended up being. So the math approves of my steam cleaner purchase. Hell, it’s already paid for itself and I get a bit of a workout at the same time. Woo.

8. I don’t think Jillian will ever be potty-trained.

9. We are pretty much debt-free at the moment. Aside from the 8 remaining payments on our truck and my hilarious student loan payments (and the mortgage, but that’s a large enough amount of money as to be completely irrelevant), we don’t owe nobody nuthin.’ We own everything IN the house, for once. This is a good feeling to have, especially in this economic climate. So hooray for that.

10. Jillian is at the age where she blurts out horribly embarrassing things in the most charming way. Last night, we were at dinner and a really big guy walked past our table. He was really quite enormous - I believe he even had a moon or two orbiting him. Of course, Jillian The Observer said “Wow Mama - dat’s a really big guy!” Thank goodness the place was noisy enough that I don’t think anyone heard her except for us. She’s a nut.

11. Wednesday is a big day. I’m starting with a personal trainer at the gym. It’s been a long time in coming, but I finally finally finally got over myself and made the appointment. I’ve accepted that I cannot do it on my own. I can’t make myself work out every day (indeed, here I am writing this mess and there is a treadmill downstairs I should be stomping on), and I need to be held accountable to someone. So trainer it is. I think it will be good for me to have someone to push me, because god knows I won’t push myself. I’d like to lose at least 50 pounds, but the number on the scale isn’t the ultimate goal. Ideally, I want to increase my stamina and strength and if I lose 50 pounds in the process, well great. I look at myself and I don’t think I look all that fat, but then I see photographs of me and I want to vomit on them. What a good goal: “I’d like to look better in photos.” Eh, it’s better than some, I guess. I would definitely like to hate my clothes less.

12. Once I get that project going, I think I’m going to do something drastic to my hair.

Well, I turned 34 on Sunday. That was nice. I made the most amazingly-colored cake for myself and spent the day just hanging out. It was very relaxing.

However, I am now older than Jesus, if you subscribe to that mythology. Interesting thought. I was going to make a list of famous people I have managed to outlive (because I’m weird like that) but… who has time? Not me, that’s for sure. I’m too busy chasing Jillian, doing voodoo chants in the garden, and playing Tetris.

I know I’ve been neglecting you, dearest blog, and I do apologize. So much is going on, but not all of it is blog-worthy. I think I’m interesting, but I’m not sure you folks really want to hear about how the laundry refuses to fold itself and how I did the taxes this morning. Right? We’d probably all laugh a lot more about the Wii Fit calling me ‘obese’ and how I need to get my knee x-rayed before I can start running again but first I’m going to the hand surgeon to talk about my tendonitis.

That should be interesting. I’ve had tendonitis in both of my wrists for pretty much as long as I can remember. I did address it with a previous doctor but her advice was “rest your wrists for six months and it should go away.”

Um.

RIGHT!

How is that even possible in this day and age? IT’S NOT. And even if I wasn’t on the computer 23 hours a day, I still knit and play Tetris. And SOMEDAY I’d like to get back to music, which means fingers flying over the keys of the saxophone (and the flute, and the clarinet [which, where IS my clarinet, anyway?], and the guitar and someday maybe I’ll even get a piano!), and I cannot even fathom what that will be like because I no longer have any kind of embouchure whatsoever which is sad and depressing but can be remedied if I have any skills left at all which I doubt.

[grin]

Wouldn’t it be hilarious to start taking saxophone lessons again? HAHAHA, I can’t even fathom what that would be like. And it’s not really necessary, anyway - I just need to start practicing again.

So, for my birthday, I asked Freddie to buy me sessions with a personal trainer. My motivation is such that I think I need someone to kick my ass for me or else I won’t do the necessary to get in shape. And boy oh boy, do I need to get back in shape. Once the results of my knee x-rays are obtained, I’ll have a better idea of what I’m capable of/allowed to do and will progress from there.

Speaking of Jesus, I am performing my own miracles in the backyard. Freddie built me two garden boxes that we filled with a huge load of topsoil (they each hold about 1600 pounds of topsoil) and then I put seeds in! If we’re lucky (and dude, we are so NOT, since it’s 40 degrees and rainy today), we’ll get lettuce! And spinach! And scallions! And… cucumbers, maybe. I don’t follow directions and I don’t really plan ahead so we’ll see if anything at all manages to grow out there. A month from now will be the start of Tomatopalooza 2009, and I’m hoping for success with that.

My garden makes me God. It’s a nice feeling.