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My Profile
Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
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5:02 p.m. - 2014-09-24
I don't want Mick to be alone. You know those stories about how a guy's wife dies and he poops off within weeks from a broken heart? That will be Mick. Oh how this man of mine dotes on me! Sure, sometimes I tease him and say when I die he'll bring his next wife to my wake, but this is because he is a relationship kind of guy and a serial monogamist. He finds the idea of casual sex to be perplexing and disgusting. You sleep with someone it's a relationship. Boom. I think maybe he's a lesbian. Q: What does a lesbian bring on a second date? A: A U-Haul. That's Mick. Anyhow, I've wandered off topic as usual. As I was saying, I don't want my darling mannie to be alone. So to that end I've been healthy-ing up my life. Offloaded some unhealthy habits and took up new good-for-me things. Not in a waka-waka moony convert way, I still remember what chocolate tastes like, but I make smarter choices. To wit: No caffeine. This is something I'd done on and off for decades but got serious about when pregnant with Wolf and aside from the occasional cup of diner coffee (which makes my hair stand on end, shut up, besides the hairdo, smartasses) my beverages have no buzz. Which leads me to Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. Yes, my beloved Diet Coke has gone away. No aspartame ever. If I have a soda nowadays it's a Sprite. However the calories are problematic so I made a rule- two glasses of water for every soda. Fortunately I really like our water, my well water is the bomb. I know technically water isn't supposed to have any taste and I've certainly found this to be true of bottled water, Poland Spring, Dasani, etc, have negative no taste. Those bottled waters taste dead. Like drinking liquid vacuum. The house water here at Casa Sage though is really quite delicious. I've become one those people, I lug around a sports bottle full of the home vintage. Yes the bottle is hard plastic, no I don't care if it's toxic, there just so much shit I can worry about and the carcinogens in my sippy bottle are not my problem. I live in the Hudson Valley- tailpipe for the industrial mid-west, downwind of Canada's main industrial pollutant producers, a bare 40 miles north of the NYC metro area, and 14 miles as the crow flies from the Indian Point nuclear power plant- short of living like John Travolta I have to accept that the wholly carcinogen-free life is imposs. What I'm trying to do is healthy up the things I can do something about, mainly what I voluntarily put into my bod and what I make my bod do on any given day. I haven't yet succumbed to a Fit-Bit or subscribed to 10,000 Steps (shoot, the 12 Steps are hard enough) but I've been consciously getting off my rump and doing things. A potty stop now includes dancing like a mad thing to a song or two, or sweeping the kitchen, or taking a few laps around the yard with the dog, or going up or downstairs to fetch things I'd formerly ask the kid to get for me. I park well away from store entrances and add that bit of extra walking to my regular rounds. I was going to the gym pretty regularly to walk the tread until this stupid leg of mine took a shit. (More on that later.) Activity is one more piece of my 'Stay Alive to be with Mick' program. Breakfast. Lord above, do I loathe breakfast. Except for the cholesterol bomb fried egg and sausage diner breakfast, of course. Eating a daily breakfast sends all kinds of guilt and panic and disgust twanging through my model-diet alarm system. For more years than I care to think about I lived on the model diet. My own model diet. If I only got 400 calories in a day then I was going to make them the MOST delicious calories I could. So I didn't eat a bushel of kale, I had a Snickers bar and five tater tots. I had an ice cream sandwich and a cup of tea with whole milk and a tablespoon of sugar. Or my personal fave- a clementine and two shots of Jack Daniels. To roll out of bed and slug down some OJ and a bowl of Special-K before my brain was even really awake meant I'd burned through the day's food intake before I even brushed my teeth. Nuh-uh, not this eating-disordered chick. But now I do breakfast. Not always the best breakfast but I eat something and have some juice and a glass of milk. And vitamins. I take my vitamins. A multi, some fish oil, a menopause supplement. Do they actually DO anything? Unknown, but they can't hurt. The glass of milk is important, I don't like cheese and calcium supplements give me the farts so despite having bones like cement rebar I am aware I'm in my year (again!) and may soon be entirely estrogen deficient. Hence the deliberate ingestion of milk. My maternal grandmother died from osteoporosis. Sort of. While she was bending over to smooth a bedspread her spine and ribs shattered and she died of sepsis from perforated organs. And my grandfather who was besotted with her even after 55 years of marriage died eight months later. Without Grandma he had no reason to live. He simply withered away. I don't want this for my Mick. Red meat. This one isn't voluntary, most days the smell and taste of red meat makes me urp. This started a few years ago when my hormones were in complete chaos. Actually it was so when I was pregnant with my kids too. I have an extremely sensitive nose and the iron-blood-raw muscle smell of beef during hormonal havoc was puke-worthy. When the ovaries were rampaging my nose cranked to a zillion. Nowadays it's not so much the smell as the mouth-feel. And not just beef, sometimes I'll be chewing some chicken or a pork chop and my throat closes up. Not going down, nope. And over to Mick goes my plate and without a word he deftly removes the offending animal flesh and I finish my meal with a few bites of potato or pasta. I have no ethical issues with meat, we humans are omnivores by nature and shouldn't feel bad about eating from all the available foods. Sometimes when the tides or the stars or the alignment of something is right I can plow into a steak or a greasy hamburger and I enjoy the hell out of it and make no apologies. Mostly though I eat a quasi-vegetarian diet and it plays into the healthy lifestyle but I'm not thrilled to have given up my snarling carnivore pleasures. Sunshine and fresh air. Not much I can do about this when the summer's heat oppresses and the ozone count is smothering, but now that autumn is here (mostly, it was hot as Hades yesterday) I go outside. Even if it's just to talk to Princess while she takes a leak or say hello to the trees as they ready for their big sleep. Get my vitamin D and the mind clearing from blowing the cobwebs out. Now you'd think with all this virtuous eschewing of known Bad Things and the deliberate cultivation of Good Things that I'd be slimming down and glowing and full of all kinds of vim. WRONG! I feel like Death on rye. I am exhausted. My skin looks like sneaker insoles. I'm either constipated or running ass gravy. I've gained 24lbs since May. My left leg is dreadfully swollen and hot and my ankle feels like someone gave it a good knock with a ballpeen hammer. If I go to the gym after a mile I'm weeping from the pain and my foot looks like a loaf of bread. My vision is deteriorating and my pee stinks and is GREEN. My poor vag is forever hosting a yeast party and I can't remember the last time I was horny. This isn't newbie shock. I've added most of these improvements months, even years ago. But I seem to have reached critical mass. The better I behave the shittier I feel. The more I try to improve the deeper into the pit of despondency, despair, and lousy health I go. Technically I might live longer but at what price? I don't want to live another six months feeling this crappy let alone an extra twenty years. Mick is an athlete. He rides his bike 20-30 miles at a clip for fun. He's spent the last 40 years in the gym lifting tons of weight at a go. His numbers make our GP blink with surprise. No 55 year old's chart looks like this! Mick's cholesterol number is a shoe size. His resting heart rate is like 4. His BP makes the sphygmomanometer go, "Huh? WTF, dude?" My guy is absurdly healthy. He's the rule whereas I am the exception that proves it. I honestly felt better living on Virginia Slims and donuts. My brain fired at a crazy pace on Skittles and KFC and my word count was in the thousands every single day. Now I'm lucky to stutter out a lousy blog post every few weeks. Forget about my other work. The poor souls on the Bataan Death March were in better shape and frame of mind than I am right now. Me with my healthy diet and chemical-free bod and my exercise and Can Do! Attitude. I turned over a new leaf and all that was on the other side were worms, fungus and crud.
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