No wonder my head hurts

I just spent all morning updating my lab notebook, it was only a week's worth of stuff, but somehow I managed to run upwards of seven procedures for 3 different projects, plus supervising students in another project. That's more like a normal 2-3 weeks worth of stuff. Now I don't feel so silly for feeling completely overwhelmed and stressed out for the past 10 days.

Our flat is still in chaos, the purge cleared out a lot of stuff that needed clearing, but we still haven't reorganized what's left behind. Also, I may need to be job hunting soon, or in the next couple of months, or in 6 months, or not at all. I don't know either way, but it's shaken me up, since I have the stable job, Matt has the laid-off-every-3-years job. I will say more when I know more, but I don't know when that will be.

Speaking of which, he's getting laid off. Or would be if he hadn't already been given the heads up by his supervisor and started looking for other positions within his company that he could transfer into. He's already been picked for one and we're now waiting to hear what the salary is supposed to be. The thing is, it's a management position, which is a great career step for him, but it's absolutely shitty hours, and we have heard there's a possibility they will try to get him to do the management job at his current pay scale. Which, frankly, is not worth it. So we are waiting to hear about the salary because that will tell us if it's going to be a 21% raise (you read that right), management track career boost, but we will only see each other on weekends...Or if he's going to turn it down and continue to look for work outside his current company.

I'm torn. The size of the potential raise would make a huge difference to us, we'd be able to travel as well as save for the future, and spend a bit more on home improvementy type stuff, but it's a two year contract during which he'd be working from 3pm to 1am 4 days a week, on call 24 hours, and working every 5th weekend as well. The alternative is a smaller career boost, maybe some time on unemployment while he looks, and a job pretty similar to what he's doing now, with similar hours, so we'd still see each other on weekday evenings. The certainty of more money and more stress, or the uncertainty (and stress) of a longer job hunt, and hopefully a return to close to the status quo, which do I wish for?

Actually I know which I wish for: the management position to offer enough cash for it to be worth it. Because then we'd know what was going to happen. Being able to take more trips, and some intelligent routine-shifting will make the funky work hours much more bearable for both of us. What's weighing on me is the fear that they won't offer the raise they should, which will be a blow in itself, and also mean more uncertainty until another job appears on the horizon.

To counterract some of this stress we went for a short hike in the mountains yesterday, then had a late lunch in Julian, followed by a trip to Witch Creek Winery. This is the winery we got our wedding wine from, the woman who does the tastings is a real character, always remembers us and gives us the cellar club discount even though we're not cellar club members. When I bought the two cases for our wedding she gave me 20% off for buying cases, then made up another 15% discount for the hell of it and threw in some pepper jelly for free. I think she's angling for us to bring back in one of the bottles of '99 port we've got laid down in our closet. It was good spending a day together doing stuff we did when we were first seeing each other.

Nesting & purging

The weekend before Hallowe'en Matt and I did a purge. We rediscovered the floor in our second bedroom, found that the top of Matt's dresser is made of wood, not fashioned from a mountain of unfolded clothes waiting to be ironed, mended, or hung up in the closet. We also found a pillowcase I have been looking for since September, and had assumed to be eaten by the washing machine. A slightly less pleasant discovery was that somebody had peed on the big cushions atop my blanket box. Since it wasn't me or Matt, it had to be one of the cats, unless our friends have taken to sneaking off and scent marking random places in our bedroom during a party. Our cats have been feeling territorially threatened by a stray who hangs out by our windows and taunts them. It has not been a pleasant month to be carpet in our condo. Thank Petsmart for Nature's Miracle, which has saved us from living in That House. You know the one I mean, the one that reeks of kitty effluvia. We still have unusually hairy lampshades and white fluff on our burgundy sofa, there is no question that long haired cats inhabit our flat, but at least we are wining the battle against catstink.

Anyway, back to the purge.

By about 3pm we had a 6'x4' area of our living room taken up by a 5' tall stack of stuff to donate. Two G3 macs, a box of books and software to go with them, two plastic lawn chairs, a queen bedspread, a king duvet, two superficially destinked giant cushions, two boxes of clothes (how did we manage to find 2 boxes to discard? We already did a clearout 3 months ago!) a small lamp, my stereo from university (sniff, farewell little blue Sony, you served me well) two window box-fans, a ridiculously large and cavernous motorcycle rucksack, a vase, and, the star item: an iRobot Roomba automatic vacuum cleaner robot thingy, complete with remote control. We inherited the robot from our neighbors, it couldn't hack their cat hair (hur hur), and it did no better with ours. Off to the charity shop it goes, I'll take my tax deduction thank you. When we loaded all of this into the SUV it was FULL. We don't even fill it when we go camping for four days and take lots of firewood.

We still need to complete the autumn cleaning by tidying and sorting the desks and book cases, maybe I can find some kitchen stuff to donate, but I doubt it, I use all my kitchen stuff. I'm already realizing I could have offloaded my wedding shoes and some sneakers I never wear, which would free up slots in the closet for a pair or two of new shoes I have been eyeing on zappos. Anybody want a pair of size 10W winter white leather pumps with a 1" heel? Pristine condition? Lovely ballet-slipper styling your mother would approve of...no? OK.

It felt very good to clear out some junk that had been cluttering up our home for far too long. We capped off the weekend by going to Home Depot and buying knobs and drawer handles for the previously plain kitchen and bathroom cabinets, they look very spiffy.

Once I finish my statistics class at the end of this month, we are going to install an arch in the entrance to our hallway, and put molding sills on our windows. We have already allocated any Christmas money to the painting fund. Farewell rental-reminiscent white, hello taupe and linen to compliment the carnelian wall in the living room, teal wall in the kitchen (sounds weird but we love it), and sapphire & ice blue in the bedroom. This time next year the poor long suffering ugly-ass carpet will be ripped out and replaced with tile and hardwood. Oh, and we are now debating replacing the ugly plastic bathtub with an better enammeled model and tiled walls. Happy evil nesting plotting has been going on apace. We might even need to start taking notes of what we agree on so we don't forget any fun.

Sub-ba Cul-cha

There is a line in a Pixies song where Frank Black sings "sub culture" in typical grunty Frank Black wierdo style. I now have this one fraction of a line stuck in my head, I can't even remember which song it's from.

The sub culture I'm thinking of right now is that of knitting and crochet. I recently took up knitting, now I'm trying crochet, making scarves for my Mum, Sister and Dad for Christmas. I signed up for Lion Brand emails hoping I'd get coupons or something, but mostly it's ads for pattern books and the odd free pattern. At least now I understand some of the jargon, though I doubt I'll ever be someone who constantly carries yarn, needles and hooks with me. I may be a tad obsessive about some things, but my hands can be idle without me flipping my wig.

The pattern book advertized in today's email is all patterns for shawls, shrugs and wraps, I'm sort of tempted, I like cozy wrap-type clothing. I look at the picture on the front and think "I'd love to make that!", I think about making a couple of swishy wraps for friends. Then I read the second part of the book description:

"Book Inclues 30 original designs including a Western-style men's poncho ("moncho"), and an adorable children's capelet embellished with organza ribbon."

MONCHO?

I am speechless. (Also not buying this book)

Ooops

It turns out that "Got Brains?" is the trade mark of a company akin to thinkgeek.com that sells neuroscience related brain-themed stuff. They have BRAIN EARRINGS, and BRAIN keychains! Be still my beating geeky heart. Actually, the DNA earrings are very attractive, subtle, not obviously novelty gear.

Anyway, I got a cease-and-desist comment to quit using their trademark as my blogs name. So I did. I might even buy something from them. Nifty brain stuff!

Now I am in a quandary, should I keep the new, somewhat temporary, title? Or revert to "Painfully Fluffy", which I definitely made up, 10 years ago now. Though I'm not sure I feel it applies to me so much any more.

First garment

Worsted weight, size 8 needles, 33stitches wide, 3x3 ribs.

I have now finished two scarves, but this is the first one. It will be given to my 3 year old nephew when Matt and I go to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. I'm still working on MY scarf, the one Marble was eyeing up in an earlier photo. Last night I started one for my Mum. At least my in-laws and immediate family live in climates with winters cold enough to warrant gifts of warm woolies. I am trying to find out what colour might work for my sister.

I see daylight

My desk has moved, temporarily to my boss' office. Which means that I have real natural light as I type this, it also means that the usually cramped 10x10 Ft of office are now REALLY cramped. It's lucky I have a nice, compact iMac desktop, so that my computer can perch on the front half of this desk. The entire back half is stacked (thankfully, neatly stacked) with all the binders of product info and protocols from the lab, and my notebooks. One of which I optimistically put in a box, then had to run to retrieve two hours later.

The lab is being renovated next week, so this week has been the week of packing, trashing, and frantically finishing as many experiments as possible before we're cramped into a much smaller space for the interim. It's a bit tiring. I am taking off week two of the fortnight of chaos, not going out of town, but officially unavailable to pop in to the lab and keep things going. I am hoping that I will also be unavailable to regular phonecalls asking where things are, or what stage x y or z experiment is at right now. This hope may be a little unrealistic, but we'll see.

This morning I finally got back to the gym, it had been nearly 2 weeks since my last swim. At about 5.30 I realized that was MY alarm going off, and leapt to a sitting position, somehow making the bed make a fantastic *SPROING* noise, which scared the crap out of one sleeping cat and one sleeping husband. Things went much more smoothly after that, however, once I had reassured them both that it was just me waking up violently. I had baklava and yoghurt for breakfast (I know, horribly decadent), pulled on my swimsuit and jeans, and made it there in time to fit in a 20 min swim and 10 min in the sauna before I had to get dressed and escape the impending workmen in the women's changing area. The gym is being renovated too.

My swim felt really good, I swam 3 laps more than my previous standard for 20 minutes. This time I remembered to put my goggles on squarely before getting in the water, so they remained mostly un-fogged and I got the fun of watching my hands under water and the shadow I cast on the pool bottom as I swam. I don't know why, but that's always a really fun aspect of swimming to me. Stuff looks different and mysterious under water, especially my own hands, trailing a few bubbles, with my silver rings glinting in the blue green light filtering through the water. Nail polish looks extra shimmery under water too, but I'm not wearing any today. I may paint my nails a frosty blue and pretend I'm a mermaid on my next swim.

I had been thinking of using part of my week off to paint the bedroom, but I'd probably better not add any form of home renovation to the mix just now. Too much chaos!

work in progress

work in progress
Originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

Marble is relishing a rare opportunity to check out the work in progress. When I was winding the wool for this scarf into balls, she got hold of one and ate a fair bit of wool before I caught her. So now I know I can't leave it unattended in between working on it. Real wool seems to have a magnetic attraction for cats. They're not nearly so interested in the synthetic or cotton yarn I've used previously.

This is hand dyed and spun wool that I treated myself to before I even knew what I'd make with it, there's a lot of variegation in the colour that is not showing up in the photo, little streaks of violet and cobalt blue. It's a little strange knitting myself a scarf in the hottest months of summer, but I look forward to chillier weather when I can start to wear it.

Foiled

All afternoon I have been stewing over what might have been a decent post about depression: managing it, reducing it, breaking old bad habits without dropping the ball of day to day life...



Then I sat down to post, and Marble the wondercat leapt into my lap like a bellyflopping kitten-bomb of love and started grooming my arm while purring. She has now settled down to a nap, still purring, with her chin resting on the desk.

I can't channel my angst effectively in this position, so you will have to take my word for it. I was going to be deep and meaningful and full of fabulous metaphor.

But I got distracted by something fluffy.

Spl-ugh

Sticker shock: I weighed myself this morning, I'm "only" about 5lb up, but it puts me over an important threshold I had not wanted to see again. The Scale Demon has also recently taunted Matt.

The Grooviest Gym [TM] is a well timed addition to my routine. I'm currently trying to get hold of the membership guy so we can get signed up this month, while there's no evil registration fee.

Sploosh!

Continuing in the "spl-" theme today.

Matt and I are checking out a new gym. New to us, that is. We've got a free trial 7-day pass this week. It's a historic San Diego location, ON THE BEACHFRONT, with a lovely covered swimming pool, yoga classes, aerobics classes, the usual cardio machines, free weights and isolation machines, all in well- lit pleasant rooms with nice wooden floors. Except the pool, which has astroturf around it. Weird, but completely non-slippery. There is also a hot tub, with a view of surfing machines. I haven't gone to look at the surfing machines, but my understanding is they're tanks with a wave-maker, and people ride skim boards or small surf boards on the wave (one at a time). So at some point I will be hanging out in a hot tub overlooking the Pacific, watching surf monkeys skimboard on a specially made wave machine. I love California.

I swam yesterday and today before work, only 20 minutes each time, but my muscles are feeling it. The really great thing is that driving to the gym, then from the gym to work is actually LESS total time in my car every morning. I leave early enough to miss the West bound traffic heading to the coast, then the stretch from the gym to work isn't that busy. I do have to get up earlier, but I think it's pretty cool that I'm adding in a workout, and actually spending 10-20 minutes less time driving per day.

Splurge/Splooge

OK, the gig's up. My jeans are officially getting tighter. I suppose this is pretty good considering that I have not exercised in anything close to a consistent manner for at least 6 months, though really, more like 3 years. Also considering that I don't feel like I'm paying much attention to what I eat, this means I have ingrained new, more realistic eating habits along the way somewhere. We can just gloss over the 2 or 3 times in the past 6 months that I bought a 100g Ritter Sport, then ate a whole 100g Ritter Sport in one sitting ("just two squares" does NOT work for me).

Why does the cheapest good European chocolate have SPORT in the name? This is a cruel joke. I need to stop looking at the website too, it's making my mouth water.

I had a gym membership, and I wasn't using it enough. I made a valiant effort to go to the Sunday Yoga classes I love every week, and for 4 straight weeks it was cancelled at the last minute, only one of those times I managed to find out beforehand. Then they "cancelled" the instructor. She's started a new yoga studio, which I could go to I suppose, but Matt and I made the decision to try to exercise outdoors more. Use our feet and our bikes. Which means buying a bike rack. I gleefully cancelled both our memberships, freeing up $62 a month. Three months later I have still not bought a bike rack. Those things are expensive! Especially if you have a spoiler on your car, which I do.

Exercise helps combat depression. I resisted starting counselling for a very long time because I kept telling myself I was going to work on the exercise thing, and that would help more than talk therapy. So now I am working directly on the depression thing, I have to remind myself that progress will most likely be slow, now that I'm out of hair-trigger meltdown mode and back into my much more normal state of "moderate" depression. This realization is scary in itself: that "normal" for me actually falls somewhere between mild and moderate depression. I've always joked that I'm so practiced at navigating minor life crises that the real challenge for me is normality. I'm not sure if that means part of me knew that the depression wasn't just due to circumstances, but went deeper, or if, by saying that, I have somewhat created this emotional state for myself.

This is hard.

I need to exercise. I want to feel better. I NEVER want to go back up to a size 18 (though I realize that it won't be the end of the world if I do).

I'm stuck. I'm disorganized enough at home that Matt and I are still stumbling about with no real routine. Meals are not planned until 5 minutes before they happen, I waste half an hour every morning trying to decide what to have for breakfast, for 25 years I managed to fall out of bed and just eat a decent breakfast, now for some reason I need to THINK about it first.

Correction.

I FEEL stuck. See? Therapy = good. Therapy helps me spot these negative statements and edit them to a more optimistic version.

I'm still disorganized though, and it's making everything harder than it needs to be.

Still ticking, and starting to have more fun

Busy busy busy.

The month started with Boss and Grad Student away at a conference, a conference for which we just barely managed to get the data in time to put into posters to present at the conference. Evidently there was also in incident where Grad Student's poster got THROWN OUT by the person cleaning his hotel room, and he had to go dumpster diving in the basement of a large city hotel to recover it. I'm told it wasn't even sticky when he found it. *shudder*

After they got back from conference #1, we had to get going on data for conference #2, which is right now. So for the past 3-4 weeks I have been at least up to my neck, and frequently up to my eyebrows, in all things work. Last week I stayed till 7pm one day, and 8pm on Friday, this was because the buttload of data we'd generated needed to be organized and categorized and made to mean something exciting.

Oh, and in the middle of this up-to-the eyebrowsyness, my parents were in California, so one Thursday evening after work I hung out in La Jolla, got a haircut, got Matt to drive up from our flat to meet me for dinner, then at 8pm I set out Northwards to pick up the parents from LAX (at 10pm) and drive us all to Granny's. All of which went very smoothly, no evil traffic, no delayed planes, no lost luggage (hooray). Matt took the train up to LA the next day, which did no go so smoothly at all. What should have been a journey of 4 hours door to door, with 3 of those hours spent on a comfy squishy train seat turned into 9 hours door to door, with 7.5 of those hours spent in a mysteriously too-narrow train seat that caused Matt to have interesting back and shoulder spasms the rest of the night.

That Sunday was my Granny's 90th birthday party, which went exceedingly well. She's a bit resistant to fuss and attention, but it was a low key enough affair that she was really happy. I got the bonus of finding out that the pearl earrings I'd bought her were extra appropriate because pearl is June's birth stone. Who knew?

The NEXT weekend, my parents and sister came down to visit with us, on the train (only 50min late this time), and in between trips to Marshall's and Designer Shoe Warehouse we watched a World Cup game in the bar of a casino, got pedicures involving a hand-painted flower on each big toenail (that was just me and my sister) and went to a cousin's university graduation ceremony.

That was also the weekend of Matt's and my first wedding anniversary. We went to the Wild Animal Park, with the aim of riding on a hot air balloon, but the wait for the ride was far too long, so we went back the next week. It was fun.

It was nice having a sort of re-tread of last year, with family around, a cousin graduating from UCSD (different cousin), and everybody reminiscing about our wedding day. The year has gone FAST, particularly the 2006 part of it. I hadn't realized how worried I was about my family's response to my scar, but Mum and an Aunt were pleasantly surprised, my sister found it more obvious than she'd expected, and my uncle enthused about how great I look, and how whatever I've been doing, I should keep doing it. I managed to avoid saying something about "oh? having cancer and getting a big chunk taken out of my face? I should keep doing that?".

So yeah. The looming depression that I have not mentioned much (if at all), and that led me to a lovely melt down at work last month, that depresion is being dealt with a bit. I'm in counselling, that helps, this time I'm not doing it as quickie crisis-fixing, I plan to do this for a while and really get myself on a more even keel.

The first half of this week I finished up two papers, and now I am taking the rest of the day off, starting with sushi for lunch with a good friend.

Whew!

I usually score "you have both male and female brain" on these types of things. I'm glad of it, I wouldn't like my brain to be so heavily influenced by the presence of my lady parts.

You scored as Either. You brain is neither specifically male nor female dominated in the way you perceive things and as bad as this sounds it can easily mean that you are capable of combining both limiting gender aspects to your advantage. Rather than being genderless you are possibly able think freely. This does not nec. mean that you are bisexual or androgynous or indecisive, though it might. Either 68% Male 57% Female 50% Neither 36% Should you be MALE or FEMALE?* created with QuizFarm.com

What?

I'm the sappy one that dies young? Shish. Can't I be Jo?

Which Classic Female Literary Character Are you?

You're Beth March of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott!
Take this quiz!








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Snow Day

Late February in  Laguna, looking out over the Anza Desert. Brrr.
... See my Tabblo>

This is a test-post for a nifty new photosharing site called tabblo. I've had fun playing with it, it makes it possible to arrange photographs more like an album or scrap book, with different size prints and varied layouts. (I am not being paid to say this, I got forwarded an invite to try the beta and figured I'd give it a go. I got sucked in by two things: the ability to transfer all your flickr photos right away, and the fact it talks to my blog.

I like the way the layout works for showing a bunch of shots of something at once.

Hmm...

Halfway between sociology and engineering lies...Neuropathology? Oddly, this makes sense to me, especially if you add in my long term goal to study epidemiology or something similar.

You scored as Engineering. You should be an Engineering major! Sociology 92% Engineering 92% Psychology 83% English 83% Philosophy 83% Biology 75% Anthropology 75% Chemistry 67% Dance 67% Mathematics 58% Theater 58% Journalism 42% Linguistics 42% Art 25% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com

Happy Easter *EDIT* NO CHOCOLATE RABBITS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS POST

My parents and sister are on their way to Rome today, for Easter and a conference. Not envious. Not in the slightest.

*sigh*

I remember seeing the biggest Easter eggs known to humanity in shop windows in Rome just before Easter, I was seven years old, so the giant eggs were as impressive to me as the Roman ruins and marble cathedrals. The price tags were incredible too, since Italian Lire are very small, all the prices were in the hundreds of thousands, they weren't actually expensive, but all the zeros made them look it. Maybe I will swing by Cost Plus and get some pannacotta and bacci so I can pretend I'm in Rome too. I'll skip the scary seafood pizza, complete with squid, my sister was a great fan, but I was traumatized by taking a bite of folded over pizza and having a rubbery tentacle FLOP out at me. Of course I immediately shrieked and flung the offending slice from my person. Poor Evie, deprived of her tentacle pizza.

Oh well. Happy Easter Week.

Places I have been

There's a whole lot of empty space there. I need to get myself to South America, Africa, and some Asian countries.



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Pancake Day

Tonight, while my party-animal American friends are whooping it up at a Mardis Gras party, with beads and hurricanes (no pun intended), I shall be marking Shrove Tuesday by making crepes stuffed with feta.

This is not through some stubborn refusal to take on the local traditions, Matt and I get up so early on week days that a late night drinking fest is a really bad idea. I think it is rather symbolic that I grew up thinking of Fat Tuesday as "Pancake Day", the day when we often had crepes for school lunch AND made them for dinner at home, with a vague idea that it's the last day before lent, and it's all somehow linked to Easter and Jesus and other random Christian stuff. Please note that I went to a Presbyterian school, but was raised atheist. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Fat Tuesday is Brazilian showgirls flashing their boobs at drunken frat brothers in the middle of a crowded street in New Orleans.

Pretty different.

Perhaps I should combine the traditions and make my crepes topless. Me topless that is. Or in a sparkly bikini and high heels, since the idea of making anything involving hot fat on a stovetop without a top on is a little scary. No photographs will be forthcoming. It might be worth it just to see the look on Matt's face. "No sweetie, I'm not starting to cook yet, I've just got to go change..."

All Clear

EVERYTHING came back all clear. All five moles were normal, no melanoma in the lymph node, no melanoma left in the margins they took (which means they didn't even need to take out as much as they did, but it's done now so...oh well).

Whew.

So now I can just focus on trying to look after my healing incisions. No chemotherapy or further excisions needed! I was actually very surprised that I didn't even have a whacko mole, they've been following a trend of being "abnormal", I'm glad they're gone now so I don't have to be super vigilant of 5 different odd looking moles on my face. That was making me a little crazy already.

On Friday, when the stitches came out, I wasn't too happy with how it all looked. I was also pretty busy being relieved that I got off so lightly, and celebrating with Matt (there was wine, and congnac, and chocolate, on saturday there was peach lambic and more chocolate) But by Sunday the upper half of the loooong incision had healed and is already starting to vanish. It's just a LINE now, a thin line at that, if that's what it looks 1.5 weeks post op, it'll pretty much vanish over the next few months. The lower half...I'm not examining too closely yet, it's still healing up, and I know it'll be more visible, a thicker line, but it'll probably look a lot better than my paranoid imaginings.

Sunday, Matt and I went up to the nearby mountains in search of snow, on the way up we took an offroad trail, so we got MUD and SNOW in one day trip. Yesterday was a public holiday, and I was in bed, napping and reading until about 10.30. With both cats flaked out keeping me company. Then my parents called and I spoke to them for about 2 hours. Lazy day.

My whole family is breathing a lot easier now. I'm so lucky to have been going to a dermatologist regularly and caught it early enough.

Question

This morning the glue on my dressings loosened enough for me to take off the surgical tape and replace it with fresh tape. So I got my first look at all the stitches and everything. Quite honestly I think it'll heal up really well but it freaked me out for the rest of the morning seeing so many stitches all over my face, and especially realizing how LONG the incision is from the melanoma.

I took a couple of photos for posterity. I think it will be good to be able to look back in a few months or a year, if I get down on the whole scarring issue. I think it will be good (if a little wierd) to have a photo I can look at and say "yeah...but I survived looking like THIS!".

So here's the question: you wanna see my new, temporary, bride of The Creature look?

We Love General Anesthetics

I spent a significant portion of yesterday unconscious, and when I came out of it I was filled with much happy love for the world (including the nurse who came over to me every once in a while to remind me to breathe properly because I kept dozing off and not breathing enough apparently). Highly preferable to lying on a table feeling no pain but being intensely aware of every tug and pull as a doctor fiddles about with your skin and stitches you up.

Now I'm a bit headachey and my face feels a little swollen, but I think that's pretty good for one large, one medium, and FIVE small incisions on my face. I'm also a little tanked up on vicodin, so I'm probably fairly incoherent.

The coolest part is that the dye they injected into the site of the tumor (so they could locate the correct lymph node) was bright blue, and now so is that part of my face! Yesterday the entire under-eye circle was this amazing bright cerulean blue. Like the height of 1980s eyeshadow tackiness, only UNDER my eye. It's already faded to a mere wash of turquoise, Matt got a photo about halfway between the peak of blueness and where I am now.

Biopsy results next Friday. I'm really glad the surgery's done with, I shall probably worry more about the results as Friday approaches.

Poor Taliesin. They didn't find anything wrong with him at the vet, so they decided to give him all his boosters while he was in there. I'm not sure this was a good idea, since I got him home last night he's been all sulky and out of sorts. Not even the mighty pull of a spoonful of yogurt tempted him out from under the bed this morning. So I left him to carry on hunching in dark corners looking miserable. I know how he feels.

I can't just muscle through this, I can't get up the day after surgery, pretend nothing happened, and go back to work and be PRODUCTIVE. I'm not allowed, in fact I've been told I might need help walking to the bathroom, and that I should not be left unattended for 24 hours afterwards. Probably it's the general anesthetic that will have the effect of making me groggy etc. Matt has to work, and luckily one of our closest friends, who also lives in the building, has that day off and will be on supervisory duty. I'm not sure if he'll be hanging out at our place, or just on call. I left Matt to sort that out because the thought of asking for that kind of help makes me feel sick. I hate helplessness, absolutely hate it. Realizing how much I wanted my boss to give me work to take home with me for while I'm resting up was quite a shock.

Somehow in the past 5 years I have become the kind of woman who will keep pursuing work when she's sick, even if it might make her sicker longer. I think of public holidays as a great chance to catch up on household chores, I have actually caught myself considering "doing extra laundry" as a good way to spend a "me day". I'm sure I used to be much more of a skiver, any chance to get away with not doing stuff. I used to be so bored with school, or I couldn't see much importance in getting projects done, that I'd procrastinate until the last minute and then tearfully cobble together some crap, making excuses to myself all the way.

After I graduated and met Matt, and especially after I moved jobs to this one, a job well done became such a great rewarding feeling. Perhaps I learned that hard work does pay off. Hard work paying attention and learning on the job, and also hard work fixing myself up after a long bout of depression. I'm coming to realise that work, doing stuff, being proactive, becoming a go-getting let-me-at-it kind of person is what pulled me out of the hole I was in. It also made our whole wedding planning thing work pretty well. Now all of a sudden I'm faced with a huge challenge: being able to stop.

Even as I type this I realize it's pretty ridiculous. I'm not loosing a LEG. this isn't a permanent stop. I have to face being a gibbering wreck for about 24 hours or so after surgery. Maybe not even gibbering, just disoriented and sick feeling.

I feel that I've spent far too much of my life already hiding under the covers feeling sick. I wasted somewhere between 2 and 5 YEARS not taking care of myself, crying a lot and feeling sick to my stomach just existing. Often it was helplessness that I felt. Helplessness to "fix" my life. Yay anxiety. I hope I'm just spaced out all day after surgery, the fear that is looming is that it will feel just like the pit of depression and then somehow I will get stuck there again.

Of course, I was feeling depression rear it's head before I got this diagnosis. I could go all Medium on the facts and try to convince myself that I felt this coming and was mourning it in advance... or I could skip the BS hokey pokey and admit that maybe go! go! go! go! go! go! go! go! go! go! wasn't working that well as a long term life solution and I'm getting overdue for seeking a little, you know, balance.

One of the signs of this need for balance is that the day I learned the biopsies had shown melanoma, after about an hour of freaking out I started to feel good about the new challenge to overcome, because it would distract me from the lingering depression that had started to really scare me. You know something's wrong when a cancer diagnosis turns into a welcome battle with the world.

I know I will need to give myself some "me time" (sans laundry folding), to figure out what I need once I'm done with getting carved up and biopsied. Right now I think it's ok to huddle under the covers seeking comfort. Hopefully Tali will forgive me for taking him to the vet and come and sulk with me instead of at me.

Happy Birthday to Me

Sunday was designated stuff-your-face day, Matt woke me up by bringing me a Coldstone Creamery chocolate raspberry ice cream cake in bed. With candles that look like crayons! My initial plan was to have icecream cake and a bottle of zinfandel for breakfast, but since I wanted to go to yoga we saved the wine for AFTER the workout. We also had steak for dinner, followed by more cake. Yum.

Today we are "celebrating" by having the pre-operative consultation with the surgeon, getting the stitches taken out of my leg, then going home for leftover london broil steak and the last bit of cake. with super yummy framboise lambic to wash it down.

Oh, and Tali's getting checked out by the vet today, poor little bugger has been acting strange, like he might be about to scent-mark stuff, even though he's never been a spraying kinda guy. So he gets to have his nethers probed by a stranger. Being away from his sister will probably be the worst part of the day. They do much better going to the vet as a pair, so they can cower in their carrier together.

All Is Vanity

While faffing about attempting to resize a photograph to send in for a passport I was seduced by the sparkly lure of airbrushing. First I used it to conceal the incision that will soon be replaced by a much larger one, then I dotted out a couple of obvious pimples. By that point I was far too mad with the new power to make up for my inexpert application of concealer and powder, and I zapped away the under-eye shadows too!

I'm officialy a Californian. Or maybe it's just reaching 26.

If you go to the flickr page and flip back and forth between the two photos it's pretty cool, just like one of those "debunking the beauty myth" websites showing magazine covers.

Don't ask

Molemap
Originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

for some reason I felt compelled to make this in word just now.

I think it's pretty self explanatory.

Status Report

OK, the melanoma on my leg was teeny-tiny (less than 1 mm) so they only needed to take out a 5 mm margin, which was done on Tuesday, leaving an incision about 4-5 cm long, with five stitches in it. Just like the first "big" incision I had on my face, which has now faded to a 4cm line that only shows if the light catches it right.

The one on my face was 1.6 mm thick, which makes it on the small side of "intermediate", since I'm on the young side for such things they are going to do a sentinel lymph node biopsy [>] to check for signs of spreading through my lymph system. The margins of this tumor also have to be removed, with a 10 mm margin (eek), which means a circle about the size of a US quarter, or a UK 10p piece, this will be done using the MOHS technique [>]. The Mohs is done with a local anesthetic, which would be kind of disconcerting apart from the fact that I've done this before, and now I won't be lying on the table freaking out about massive scarring, because the first big incision has healed pretty damn well. I bet you couldn't even look at my flickr account and tell me where that first big incision was. Unless you find the photo of me with a pressure bandage on my face.

OK, maybe I will be freaking out a little, but not as much as the first time. I know there's not much I can do but trust the surgeon's skill and take good care of it while it heals. That, and start a fund for laser resurfacing and/or chemical peels.

The lymph biopsy will be done under general anesthetic, which scares me: complete helplessness = baaaaaaaaad. Complete helplessness while somebody works at my throat with a scalpel = fucking scary. I have to keep reminding myself that this is not heart surgery, and that lots of people have general anesthetics for mundane things like wisdom tooth extraction.

Now we get to the part that will probably make everyone think I'm insane.

While I'm "out" under general anesthetic, the surgeon is going to remove five other moles from my face. Yes I have that many, no I don't look like a leopard. They all look pretty much like the innocuous moley that turned out to be harbouring 1.6 mm of cancer. My moles all look pretty normal: even colour, symmetrical shape, not too big, and most of them have been abnormal. Now two have been cancerous. My dermatologist, myself, and the head and neck surgeon all reckon it's a good idea to remove and biopsy the significant moles. If they're normal, we can be relieved, if they're not normal it's better to know now, and deal with it pronto. I am going to feel like the Bride of Frankenstein for a while, with stitches on my leg and on 5 small and one sizeable incision on my face.

I'm all calm right now. Listing off how many chunks of my face are going to be removed, and they might have to go back for more later. The thing with this whole experience is that when I'm freaking out, I'm freaking out WAY too much to type or write coherantly. I've been crying in my car a fair bit, unfortunately my long commute gives my brain plenty of time to run through worst case scenarios to itself. I'm either wailing inside and wanting to run far far away or hide under my bed with a cat, or I'm dealing with life. Dealing pretty well I think. I'm trying to make sure I let myself say I'm scared, and cry a bit, trying to let some of it out so that I can hold it all together enough to feel proud of myself.

Sod's Law

I didn't mention this before, because it's become kind of routine for me to have a dodgy mole removed when I go to the dermatologist for a mole-patrol checkup, but I had another two dodgy moles removed right before Christmas. The incision in my left shin healed wonderfully. By Sod's Law, the incision on my left cheek, right next to my nose was the one that didn't heal well. It wasn't an infection, the culture they took came back negative, but it was inflamed and didn't want to close. So I've been keeping it ointmented and covered to try to minimize scarring.

Waste of time.

Most of the moles I've had removed (3 out of 5 until this crop) have turned out to be "abnormal" in a benign way, and have required further margin to be surgically taken out. Sod's Law made sure that 2 of those were on my face (the other abnormal one was on my scalp).

Sod's Law has really outdone itself this time though. Both biopsies came back as melanoma. Very SMALL melanomas, but melanomas nonetheless. That's cancer, the BIG C. It's the nastiest skin cancer, most likely to spread to other tissues, most likely to recur. It's actually the best cancer to have if you're going to have a nasty spreading type cancer: at least it's highly detectable, and early detection means the only treatment required is excision and vigilance. No chemo. Thankfully.

So, back to my lovely dermatologist on Tuesday, to remove margins from my shin. She looks like a prettier version of Janice, Chandler's irritating recurring girlfriend on Friends, so I will call her Dr Janice. Then I will see a specialist in head and neck dermatology and surgery on Wednesday to discuss the offending site on my left cheek, and the possibility of doing a lymph node biopsy. I want the biopsy, I want to KNOW that it's clear, not assume.

Of course, I'm sure I'm sounding (reading?) much too calm. This is because I got the phone call around noon, and have already quietly freaked out about it by myself, then told a friendly coworker, and freaked out a bit more, then told my friendly boss, been sent home, and bought a fancy shower curtain and fuzzy bath mat as retail therapy. I've had 5-1/2 hours to digest this. There will be further freakouts, I may even post during one, they make good reading (if you want to see what I look like freaking out and questioning my existance and role in life etc., just check out 2001-2002 in the archives).

Matt just came home, and I told him right away. He takes my word for medical detail, so hopefully he won't be *too* worried, not constantly at any rate. I'm not going to tell my parents, not until I've had the margins cleared and (hopefully) get the all clear from a lymph node biopsy. My mother's brother died of internal melanoma, it would be such a nightmare to put her through the waiting and worrying again, so I will tell them when it's done and we're in vigilance mode, not treatment mode.

It's freakish and frightening, but it's not the threat-of-death diagnosis a lot of cancers are. More the threat of fear of recurrance and definite need for more bits of my face to get chopped out. I'd been wondering if I should have the remaining moles removed prophylactically, now I'm sure I will.

Shallow though this sounds I'm just REALLY glad this diagnosis came after the wedding. I think I'm going to be looking at a couple of years at least of babying incisions, and then saving up for a laser resurfacing or something. On some level I've been expecting this, you don't have 5 moles removed in 3 years, and have 3 of them turn out ot be abnormal, without something being a bit fishy.

Strike that

Bugger the giving up sweets. Some Januaries it works for me, some it doesn't. A week of sleeping like crap and weird hormone-withdrawal weeping/depression completely killed that. Forbidding myself from eating sweets of any kind was depriving me of much needed serotonin. So I ate a lemon poppyseed muffin. Best muffin I've had in ages.

Still haven't used the workout DVDs either.

My name is Cliche, I'll be your sporadic blogger for the evening

I bought a set of workout DVDs. In the first week of January.

And I'm cutting out sweets. For January.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

My computer tells me it's 4am, therefore it is time to call an end to Hogmanay revelries, involving random 20 yr old finnish girls asking for the recipe for pimento cheese, old Scottish flatmates talking politics with new (ish) mexican friends...it has been a goood one for the books signifying life coming together and making an odd kind of sense of past and present. My husband is snoring. Time to go join him. Since So Cal is behind most countries in ushering in the new year.

Obey the Gingerbread

eat02.jpg
Originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

Yes, that is a river of chocolate surrounded by mini marshmallows. In the top right corner of the photo there is a bowl of peanut butter flavoured fudge to cancel out any virtue we might feel by eating the bits of fruit and veg.

Despite this photograph, so far the festive season has been pretty "good" as far as pigging out goes. I may make up for that tomorrow night at the New Year's Eve party we're hosting.

Hosting Hogmanay. YAY. I'm excited. New Year's Eve is a big deal in Scotland, and I've garanteed us a bunch of first footers by tempting them into our home with ham and mulled wine.

Sunset / Moonrise With Cold Fingers

Nov2005 009
Originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

We drove into the nearby mountains yesterday afternoon, hoping to get lunch at a bakery, and finding they were out of everything but nachos at the snack bar. So we had nachos and danish pastries for lunch, then carried on to a little bit of offroad driving. The trail we were on turned out to connect with one of our favourite longer trails, but there was a gate closed across it, so we didn't get to do a big loop, just got out of the car and wandered along the trail for a bit. It was pretty chilly, but that felt nice as long as we were walking. It felt like real November weather. We got back to the vehicle just in time to avoid being stuck in the dark without flashlights. For the last few minutes of walking back, Matt had his camping knife ready in his hand in case of coyotes or mountain lions.

I must admit I was being cheerfully oblivious to the whole "we're in the wilderness" thing. I'm so used to living in a place with city parks, and even if you do go off into the Scottish wilderness, you're hardly going to be leapt upon by a pissed off rabbit or a rabid sheep and have to defend yourself with a bowie knife. The wild haggis keep themselves to themselves. Sometimes it's a little daunting to realize that people do get jumped by mountian lions here, not often, but a couple of times a year. Maybe I should get myself a camping knife too, all I had yesterday was a pair of tweezers I brought in case of a close encounter with a cactus.

Lions and Cacti and Bears! Oh My!

O.K. No bears here, they're further north, but I know what to do if I encounter one: run, but not up or down hill, AROUND a hill. Seriously, they can't run with one side higher than the other, but they can climb trees. So if you ever encounter a wild bear run along a hillside, don't climb a tree like everyone does in the movies.

Watch what you say

Not that long ago I was commenting that my new post-wedding life contained few significant landmarks and deadlines for me, and that that was a good state of being for me.

Well, evidently the lull was too much for me and I needed a new project, because I've decided to apply for graduate school. Specifically to study epidemiology and add the letters "MPH" (Masters in Public Health) to my name. "M.P.H." The post graduate degree that sounds like a stifled burp. Seriously, try it. Try saying "mph" and making it sound scholarly.

So besides my current biostatistics class (in which I have earned a "A" every week so far, go me) I now must start studying for the GRE, which is a post-graduate study entrance exam type thing. Standardized test a la I.Q. tests. I've already signed up to take it in the middle of December, just to make it real. The application is due March 1st. So there's two new deadlines I'm counting down to: Mid-December GRE exam, and 1st of March application due, including spiffy letter of intent and worshipful reference letters from my boss and her cronies. My boss is very supportive of this, I'm very relieved, I was a little afraid to tell her I'd suddenly moved up the schedule for deserting her.

Jitterbug

Wow. The coffee cart coffee must be way stronger than what I'm making at home, I just had one cup from the cart and I'm all zoomy and light headed. My hands are actually shaking! For reference, I usually have 2 or three large mugs of coffee in the morning at home.

I'm going to eat my lunch, drink some water and hope that I slow down soon so that I can do some cell culture. Hopefully my coworkers won't be put off by me flittering about the lab muttering "buzz buzz buzz, zoom zoom, buzzbuzzbuzz", which is how a friend of mine once responded to a double hammerhead.

On Being Damp

Being damp and a little bit cold reminds me of home. I never used to bother with an umbrella because Edinburgh rain so often came with gusty winds that it was too much hassle and you got wet anyway. Besides the fear of thwacking a passerby with your brolly because of an ill-timed puff of wind.

Right now I'm sitting at my desk with damp feet, I stepped in a puddle and my formerly waterproof wondershoes are evidently wondershoes no longer. Just soggy moccasins.

The odd thing about rainy weather is that it makes me homesick. You'd think I'd be extra glad to live in California when it rains, because the rain here is only a small part of the year, but it makes me miss my parents' house and the fireplaces. Damp cold weather NEEDS a roaring fire to toast yourself in front of. My electric fan heater doesn't quite cut it. I have to resist the urge to make this an excuse to live on tomato soup and fried cheese.

Now that I think about it I was cold a lot growing up, which is probably why I'm such a heat seeker now, except for when the weather gets over 90F and I turn into a melted puddle of grumpy goo. Cold bathrooms: trying to keep my entire body under the stream of hot water in the shower because despite the steam, the air stayed resolutely chilly; being thankful for wooden toilet seats, so they were never that cold to sit on. Cold bedroom: getting into bed and spending the first few minutes shivering until my body heat warmed up the pocket of blankets I was in; trying to change into my pajamas under the blankets so I never had to be completely uncovered; giving up on my bedroom and just getting dressed for the morning in the kitchen, in front of the AGA, on which I would pre-warm my shirt.

I wonder if it would drive me crazy now to be so cold. I don't think so, our flat on 30th street was so uninsulated we referred to it as a shack, we'd wake up able to see our breath and shuffle quickly to the livingroom and turn on the heater. Which, by the way, was mounted about 6 feet above the floor level so it very kindly heated all the air next to the ceiling before it started to do us any good. Chilly mornings huddled into a bathrobe and slippers are my favourites, they make it so much more fun to wrap your hands around a mug of hot tea or coffee, rainy weather makes me appreciate my nice dry flat full of warm colours, and it really makes me appreciate the fact that Marble is a well trained foot-warmer. She's quite happy to take a nap on top of my feet.

In the name of science

I got up at 5.05am this morning, somehow managed to make myself porridge (and eat it) and stagger out the door to my car just after 6. The coffee pot was empty, and making more was beyond my mental capacity that early.

Leaving the house without coffee was a mistake, I found myself fighting droopy eyelids at stoplights by the time I got to work. Now that I've done the 7am cell treatment that neccesitated my early morning, and I've got 2 1/2 mugs of coffee starting to work their magic on my system I'm finally starting to feel awake. Hooray for the mini coffee machine on my desk. Hooray for pilfering the little pods of milk from the cafeteria.

I still want a nap though.

No wonder I suck at pushups

I can bench press....

*drumroll*

25lb.

Twenty Five Measly Pounds.

The only way I can go is up, since 25lb is the weight of the unloaded bar I have no choice but to work my way up to...THIRTY MEASLY POUNDS.

Actually I'm really pleased at yesterday evening's workout, my arms, shoulders and back are aching nicely, and nothing went ping.

My legs are even more pathetic than my bench pressing skills though, unloaded squats for yours truly for a while before I attempt to add the 25lb bar across my shoulders.

I don't know what I'll be doing this time next year

I can be fairly sure I'll still be working the same job, continuing to expand my role in the research, living in the same flat with the same husband and the same cats (and the same too-long commute). But there's no big events being counted down to in my life. No wedding, no big trip, NO MOVING. Hooray for no moving.

Matt's got a big exciting countdown going on, he's counting down to leaving his job on December 31st and starting life as a full time student in January. I suppose this is a countdown for me too, but not really, it's going to be a huge change for Matt, and he can't wait to be staying up late studying for himself rather than staying up late cramming Microsoft text books and running labs that don't work in preparation for teaching the next day. Really, that's Matt's landmark, when he transitions from work to university my job will be to keep an eye on the money and make sure we don't go broke, which is my job right now anyway, so it'll be less of a big change for my daily life.

The point is, for the past several years I've been all about the big countdowns. Being a student was a life full of them: the end of this class, the start of the next semester, chopping up the years into bite-sized terms and holidays punctuated with final exams. Counting down to graduating, to moving to the US, to moving apartments, to moving again (to my very own studio), to moving in with Matt, to moving with Matt, to closing escrow on our condo (and moving), to the handfasting, to our trip to the UK, to the wedding. Actually the counting down to the wedding overarched a couple of the moves. See all those moves in there? I didn't even list every one since I graduated...

A woman at work had a baby about a month after Matt and I got married, then a couple of weeks ago a friend told me she's pregnant and I realized that on some level I'm envious of the baby-fest. Probably because now I'm in a stable relationship, and I know who the father would be of my kids, so I can actually realistically picture it happening. I've always known that I want to be a parent, but it was always a very off-in-the-future hypothetical kind of thing. Now we're married there's actually a timeline, albeit a very vague timeline: Matt's going back to university, then I go to grad school, then we seriously look at the whole kids thing, 'cause we'll be in our early 30s by then. That's a loooong timeline, five or more years. That's also about the time we've agreed to consider relocating to the UK for a couple of years. I'm not counting down to it, it's too vague and far away. I'm certainly not thinking "just 5 more years and then I can get knocked up AND move countries!" It will be exciting to be at the point where we decide it's time to throw away the birth control and see what happens, but I don't want it NOW. Yet I definitely have been feeling a twinge of envy for my few acquaintances who are "there" already and have kids.

I've been wondering why I should feel this twinge, I certainly don't think now would be a good time, I want to spend time with my husband "just us" for a while longer, we are about to severely limit our income for the next three years, and there's no room in our place for a kid, so a kid would mean moving to a bigger place, which we can't afford since our income is going down for now...but still...that want is there now more than I've ever felt it. Weird. I started to worry that I was falling into the trap of longing for the next stage and forgetting to enjoy what I have now. I wondered if I was talking myself into wanting something that just plain doesn't make sense right now, just so I could feel deprived. I tried to talk myself out of that little envious twinge. It didn't work.

Then, last week, I was talking action plans with my boss, what we want to happen in the next 6 months, and the next year. She picked up her calendar to illustrate which month a grant application would be due, realized her calendar only covers 2005 and said "oh, guess I need to get a new calendar". Then it hit me. It hit me that next year is a blank slate. It hit me that I don't have anything lined up for 2006 beyond living my life and meeting my goals at work. No landmarks beyond anniversaries and birthday parties. In that moment I felt so free. Free to channel my energy into improving my life every day, to focusing on now in specific and the future in general, rather than one single future event. The experience of being the newlywed wife of a student engineer and mommy to no-one but a pair of relatively well behaved felines.

Suddenly I don't envy the expectant mom and the new mom nearly so much. Having a child has got to be one of the biggest countdowns there is, and after that it's landmark after life changing landmark, all the way through to going from parent to grandparent. No thanks. I think I want to get used to living without making new landmarks for a while.

Stopped Watching, Started Loosing

In the 10 days since I quit Weight Watchers Online, I have lost 1.6lb, breaking a 5 month plateau, granted the plateau also involved my wedding, and all the preceeding planning and running about like a headless chicken, not to mention the celebratory eating and drinking.

I think it's pretty apparant that WW was not doing it for me any more, it worked great when I first started, re-reminding me of portion sizes and mental strategies etc. I also started out on their "core" "no-counting" plan which involves eating lots of veg, fruit and wholegrains, and only using the anal retentive tracking on starchy and/or processed foods. That was perfect because I was also trying to move towards a less processed diet anyway, but it didn't work out long term because I use bread a lot in my diet, wholegrain bread, but bread nonetheless, and that's not a "free" food on the core plan, so I'd run out of points and feel pressured and stressed. So I switched to the count everything plan, which felt good for a couple of weeks because of the flexibility to pick whatever food, but I still didn't loose weight. Even when I was "OP", or on plan to anyone who hasn't been initiated into the cult.

That's another thing that was starting to bug me: all the jargon, the insiderspeak. It made me feel more on a diet that I wanted to, I don't want to be on a system or a plan, because then you can be off plan too.

Last week I realized that I was obsessing far too much over numbers: my points balance for the day, for the week, the fact my weight wasn't budging. I was feeling too strictly limited and that made me want to rebel and eat restricted items like icecream and french fries. I think part of it was that the simplified counting scheme, though easy to use and a great idea, made the points system too abstract and arbitrary for my brain. Calories I get, I have a real life handle on what they mean, fat calories, protein calories, carbohydrate calories, fiber, sodium content...blah blah blah. The points system is easier to pick up because it's simplified, but in the end it's too simplified for me, it wasn't giving me a sense of understanding and control of my diet, just a feeling that these arbitrary numbers were making me feel bad for going "over" this day or that.

So I quit. I bought the $20 FitDay Software for my home computer, pulled some new recipes to try, and recomitted to health over and above weightloss.

Whaddya know, I made salads for my lunches through the week, pigged out on the fruit plate at a lunchtime meeting but completely ignored the cookies (I knew I was allowed one, I just plain didn't fancy one, and they're good cookies too!), went to the bellydancing class on Monday and lost 1.6lb! Just taking the pressure off by removing my daily and weekly limits led me to make better choices anyway. Miraculous!

So I'm still tracking, because it will make me stay accountable, and I honestly want to know how many calories I have to eat (or not eat) in a week to loose weight. This way I still have graphs of my weight progressing and now I get pie charts of my calorie sources for the day and everything. As Dietgirl said: Geekgasm!

Just wait though, in a few months I'll probably feel the need to set limits for a while to kick me off another plateau. It seems to be periodic re-asessing and change of approach that really helps keep things going when you're reinventing yourself bit by bit.

Harvard loves me as I am

I'm playing around with a bunch of calculators on the website of the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention, and am generally pleased by the results: I'm low risk for every form of cancer they've got, except for melanoma because I'm a peelie-wallie pasty white Celt. The wierd thing is that, for the cancers where risk is affected by being overweight...the website is saying "well done, you are not overweight". I put in correct height/weight stats, and every other website I've asked has said "overweight" or even *gulp* "obese". I think I'm right on the borderline between those two categories if you go by the highly flawed BMI chart.

Meh. So Harvard think's I'm not overweight. I'm tempted to play with the weight data to see at what point they would consider me overweight.

HAH! OK, the CANCER risk calculators don't think I'm overweight, but the DIABETES risk calculator does. I guess cancer is linked to more extreme levels of overweight.

Now I'm going to go pull faces at the Diabetes Risk Calculator, cause it called me a fatty.

I'm sorry, I just don't undulate that way

Last night I went to a bellydancing class thinking I was well equipped for the style, being in posession of a fair bit of hip and a not invisible belly. Oh, I know it's not about jiggling the wobbly parts so much as it's about isolations of muscle groups in your abdomen. My abdominal muscles don't like being singled out it seems, or my spine isn't used to my ribcage bending one way while my hips bend the other, or something. I don't remember feeling so out of touch with my parts since I took ballet classes when I was 5 years old! I'm going back, it's precisely the unfamiliarity that makes me want to learn bellydancing, the challenge to try something different. When I took up karate it was new and different, but I took to it right away, it was easy for me, easier than I'd expected. Now I think it will be fun to try something that I don't take to right away, especially if it'll help my abdomen look anything like that of the lovely instructor Sabrina.

The other plus is that two friends of mine are going to the class, in fact Laura and Bonnie told me about it in the first place, and it's not that often that you get a chance to take up an activity with friends, usually nobody's free at the same time, or interested in the same things. As a surprise bonus on the friendly front, another woman I know appeared at the class last night too, it's a small world in San Diego when you start getting into obscure things like bellydancing, period clothing or martial arts. So far a lot of the people I've become friends with have turned out to know a lot of the other people I've become friends with too.

Sleep? It's overrated

I would not do well living in the tropics. It's only been hovering between 70-80% humidity here, with temperatures ranging from the 70s at campus to the high 90s where I live, compared to many places just in the US that's NOTHING. But I'm suffering, especially where sleep is concerned. First we have the problem that the A/C unit is in the living room, so we open windows in the bedroom, which results in much excited climbing and leaping about of cats. All night. Venetian blinds going *scrunch scrunch CLACK* is not a restful lullaby. Cats standing on your head/face on their way to the window above your head? Also not restful. Funny. But not restful.

This morning I was woken by a cry of distress from Matt, followed by the statement "Marble just SAT ON MY FACE!" I must admit that I wasn't too sympathetic, I thought of that Monty Python song and started giggling, it serves me right that I still have it playing in my head now. I just hope I stay awake enough not to start humming it under my breath, I don't want to shock my coworkers too much.

I think this weekend we will be taking several naps to compensate for a week of crummy overheated cat-bothered not-sleeping-through-the-night. The only other thing we have planned is to toddle over to the local Home Depot to learn how to install ceramic floor tiles, knowledge we plan to apply by creating a slate-tiled patch by our front door. Real slate is such yummy looking stuff, with all the natural colour variations and the nifty uneven surface, as soon as we saw the slate mixed in with the ceramic floor tile samples on display we both started drooling and figuring how to incorporate them into our place. We're officially grownups now: planning naps and home improvement projects for our weekend, not to mention getting excited over a style of floor tiles.

Remainder Brain

Today I get to test my mettle as a cell culturist. I just got handed a tube labelled "Remainder Brain" by a colleague who has taken all the nice juicy white matter parts for himself, and left behind all the other bits, the bits with blood vessels, for me. But since my lab is all about the brain's blood vessels this is a case of waste not want not. We're trying to make use of someone else's waste tissue, which might not be the BEST way to develop a primary cell culture, since the harvest was geared towards HIS goals, not ours, but I'm all in favour of giving it a go.

I Repeat Myself Sometimes

This post was originally a comment left on Mo's excellent pop-culture (as it relates to body image) blog, Big Fat Deal. I ended up waxing eloquent and feeling rather pleased with the result, so I decided to make it a post on my own blog. To remind myself that sometimes I can write, and it is funny. I just added this preamble to give due credit and linkage to my inspiration.

This article left a bad taste in my mouth. The information hidden in there is that the "non-dieting" group of women did actually change/improve their eating habits, and become more active, but they did not do it as part of "being on a diet". Also, they recieved counselling specifically geared to make them accepting of and happy with their own bodies, the "dieters" recieved support, but I can only assume that support focused mainly on the diet part, and not on supporting THEM and making them feel good about themselves.

So really I think it comes down to terminology. Arguing about terminology is, ultimately, not particularly useful to making us feel good about ourselves. We already know that thinking of it as "I'm on a diet" leads to also being "off" your diet, "breaking" your diet, and "failing" at your diet. In fact, I'm currently struggling with this very issue: trying not to beat myself up for not being on plan, while simultaneously working towards actually being on plan. All week.

I think that it's true that women who think of themselves as on a diet, or dieting, may tend towards the self-punishing techniques of trying to make themselves adhere to that diet. It's so easy to focus on the self denial and restraint part, because a lot of that is involved in changing your habits.

Healthy positive lifestyle changes and active choices are just much more FUN to do than self denial.

For example: eating a banana and a low fat yogurt because it makes your body feel good and energised instead of the short lived sugar rush of a banana split sundae...that's a positive being-nice-to-your-self behaviour.

Eating a banana and a low fat yogurt as a poor substitute for the banana split that you crave, because you're not allowed the sundae on your diet, and it would be bad for you and you'd feel like a big fat greedy cow for eating what you're not supposed to have...that's self punishing unhappy behaviour.

I think the word diet is a good one, but mostly in the context of phrases like "vegetarian diet", "organic diet", "balanced diet" or "my diet seems to contain an inordinate amount of liquorice and turmeric". We can make it a cage if we like, and lock ourselves inside it and be miserable, or we can think of it as merely a word that describes the combination of foodstuffs we use to fuel our day.

I've certainly found that starting to actively work on loosing weight and getting fitter has made me more self concious and critical about my appearance and fitness capabilities, because I'm paying attention now. It's hard to change your habits without becoming more self aware. It's hard to be self-aware without discovering a few things you're not very happy with, and wishing them gone, or different, or FIRMER.

Oh, and I also think claiming numbers as definitive as 90-95% is an immediate red flag, I want to know their margin of error on that number, not to mention how they define "success" and "failure". If you define failure as gaining back ANY weight whatsoever ever again...the only way to succeed is to go on the chainsaw diet and chop off you head, because you certainly won't gain back any of that pesky weight if you're dead!

Perfect Light

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Originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

Imaginary Friend No More

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Originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

This lovely lady is an imaginary friend of mine from the internet. We met online in 2000, the first time we met in person was just before Matt and I moved in together, and her visit was something ridiculously short like 18 hours. During which my bathroom drain backed up, so I got to offer the hospitality of Matt's sofa.

The second time we met in person was when she flew cross-country to be a bridesmaid in my wedding, which is this photograph. She spent the whole weekend being greeted by exclamations of "oh, so you DO exist!" from my local friends.

They had collectively dubbed her my imaginary friend. I'm not sure if that makes me a prime example of the 21st century restructuring of interpersonal communication and friendship...or a geeky wierdo.

Most Important Photo

Wedding 023
Originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

Never mind my dress, hair and makeup, never mind my sweetie's fabulous kilt and plaid (and hair). It's the CAKE I have to show everyone first!

Isn't it beauteous?

Married!

The wedding was wonderful. Exactly what we'd planned, and so much more, we made half the guests cry with our ceremony.

Now I'm going to enjoy my homecoming beer and snuggle with my HUSBAND.

Bovine Themed Dairy Product Container

This whole wedding registry thing is pretty interesting. I vary back and forth between obsessively checking the list to see if something else got bought yet, and feeling horribly greedy and trying to pretend that it isn't really me asking for monogrammed beer mugs or a $190-dollar picnic set (since removed).

It's also interesting seeing who buys what, we've already been told we're weird for not picking vastly overpriced china place settings and opting more for cookware and random "grown up" things like table linens and serving bowls. One aunt decided she wanted to get us something much more fancy and made us pick a crystal decanter and glasses to go with. Although I know the gifts aren't really the point, it is sort of nice to get some high-end kitchen stuff to balance out the money we're spending on throwing the wedding. With the credit card balance we're currently chipping away at we certainly can't afford to buy ourselves an anodized nonstick frying pan and a cow creamer! That was one of the combinations that came up actually, one person combined salad bowl with salad servers, one combined healthy cookbook with a fabulous giant stew pot and my bachelor uncle picked a fry pan and a cow-shaped cream jug.

There is family significance to the cow creamer thing. I promise. I had been secretly hoping my Dad would get me a cow creamer, I think I even mentioned it to my parents, but they may have forgotten in the chaos of packing and getting their asses to California without forgetting the borrowed kilt and sporran for my Dad. Leaving behind a collection of over two hundred cow creamers and cow-themed butter/cheese dishes. Bovine Themed Dairy Product Containers. My Dad's quirkiest quirk, it gives him something specific to search for at antiques fairs, only he never realized how many there were out there until he started to look, and buy, and then he discovered e-Bay and it was all down a gently rolling dairy-country hillside from there.

There are a lot of very attractive models, ranging from Delft blue patterns to realistic markings and gilded horns. My Dad repairs the chipped horns and ears with putty and gold leaf. I'm particularly fond of the black and white Frisian ones with the udders carefully painted pink, they remind me of the tiny plastic toy farm animals I had as a kid. One striking model was made by the sculptor husband of one of his students, it looks a little like the brahma bull from India, with a cat perched on it's shoulders to represent one of my parents' two cats. A fairly plain looking brown cow has had aluminium-foil wings added, so that she can grace the Christmas tree every year (though not as the fairy on top, just somewhere on the tree).

Then there's the nightmare cows: Big bulging cartoon eyes with painted eyelashes. Purple polkadots and disembodied heads, oversized udders, pouty red lipsticky lips (to go with their false eyelashes) and some really scary colour combinations. The scariest so far is one of the disembodied heads, a large cheese dish consisting of the head resting on a matching plate. Only the face has been painted up like a crazy tribal drag queen cow and is large enough for a person to use as a face mask. Not that I've chased Matt around holding the dish/mask up to my face and mooing. I wouldn't do anything like that. Twice.

I don't plan to attempt to emulate my father's collection, but I'm really looking forward to having a nice understated plain white cow creamer in my china cabinet to remind me of it's numerous demented cousins in my parents' house in Scotland.

Shocked I even scored 8%

I am: 8% Republican.

"You're a complete liberal, utterly without a trace of Republicanism. Your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure. (You hope.)"

Are You A Republican?

Sinking

We've had another contamination issue at work, and I keep discovering stuff that I was supposed to do...and then didn't. At home, we still don't have the shelves up in the closet, as a result there is still only 4 sq feet of floor in the study. The wedding plans, and the amount of planning still needed to be done, are starting to be scary.

Oh, but I'm seeing U2 tonight. Live and in person on a big stage. Them on the stage, not me.

Oh Dear

You know, I get the feeling that my blog might make me come across as a drunkard. Particularly as I just had to try three time to spell "drunkard" correctly. Why do I think this? Because two of this year's posts have involved a hangover, and right now? Well right now I'm a little buzzed on Sangria. But honestly, most of the time I'm sober, it's just that most of the time that I'm sober I'm busy at work, or catching up on chores at home, and I only get the driving overpowering urge to post when I'm fuzzy enough to ignore the full laundry basket in our bedroom. Also, being hungover makes for funny stories, like having a severe problem figuring out you property taxes. I try to post funny stores here, not boring ones.

Right now I'm eavesdropping on my sweetie's conversation with his sister, he's mentioning our recent trip to Scotland, and how much he loved it, how much more beautiful than he'd imagined the country was. For some reason that makes my heart skip a beat. When we booked our plane tickets I told him that I'd have to use a crowbar to get him on a plane back to the dessert region we live in. It means a lot to me that the country held that attraction to him. Even though I suspect I will remain in the USA for the majority of my life, and raise primarily American children, the fact that I grew up in Scotland is a fundamental part of my own identity. I've even considered learning Gailighe for the sake of exposing my putative children to the culture. I don't really talk like a Scot, but I think like one. I think in a Scottish accent, but I speak in a transatlantic blended one. I have to, being little miss colloquial slang got too frustrating. Day-to-day I'd rather be generic and understandable than interesting and culture-specific. But it comes back to haunt me when I have to emphasize to a new acquaintance that I am, in fact, a brit, not a born-and-raised American.

Don't get me wrong, I don't deny my American half (or whatever fraction), but I first identify myself as British, and then Scottish. I certainly don't entertain the deluded notion that I'm a True Scot. When it comes down to it, Brits think of me as American, and Yanks think of me as either another Yank, or as a Brit, and frankly I feel a lot more at home being the "resident Brit" than I do being "the outsider". Considering that I'm often seen as "the outsider" in the City I was born and raised in...I think you could probably see why. It's only after living in the US for over 3 years that I begin to see that I'm becoming assimilated here and losing my obvious britishness. It's only after living here for over three years, and realizing that moving back to the UK would mean being "The American" again, and that moving to the UK is less economically viable than staying in San Diego County long term. Suddenly I have become aware of the fact that my children, Matt's and my children, will be American. Not just in name, but by birth. Aside from the technology gap and the usual cultural gap between parents and children...Our children will be American. They will not have an internal monologue that uses words like "drukit" and "dreich" or "glaekit" and "fushionless". Since my speech patterns are more John Cleese than anything else, the Scottish part of me will remain silent and unspoken to my children unless I make an effort to express it more.

The language of the region is part of me, but it's a part that carries on in silence. Culturing myself to use the obscure Scots words and speech patterns would feel like putting on an act, and would require much more time spent explaining my meaning to those I encounter day-to-day. But making these words and sayings that I find to be so definitive part of my outward personality as well as my inner world is the only way to transmit them to those around me. By the time my children, children I am not even actively planning as of now, are able to read Burns' poems and Sunset Song...By that time they will be as American as apple pie, and possibly not even interested in this obscure sub culture that their mother seems so obsessed with.

Hawkmoon 269

Like a desert needs rain
Like a town needs a name
I need your love.

Like a drifter needs a room
Hawkmoon
I need your love.
I need your love.

Like a rhythm unbroken
Like drums in the night
Like sweet soul music
Like sunlight
I need your love.

Like coming home
And you don't know where you've been
Like black coffee
Like nicotine
I need your love,
I need your love.

Matt spent over an hour yesterday looking through his collection of U2 to find this song, it turns out it's on the Rattle & Hum album, but not in the movie of the same name. He wanted to play it to me because it's the song that he associates the most with me, and us. Only he doesn't need nicotine any more.

Today is the anniversary of our first meeting with a realtor to look for a condo. Every day is Valentine's day for us, every day we're counting the blessings that come from having found each other, so I'm celebrating a year-to-the-day of starting our homeownership journey.

My Ass Is a Global Threat

No, I'm not having an attack of gas. I'm referring to the message projected by the outfit of a high-schooler I drove past this morning on my way to the freeway.

Again, I'm pretty sure that whatever you're thinking, I didn't see THAT. I am not about to post a rant ridiculing someone's large ass, that would be pretty darn hypocritical. I am about to ridicule what highschoolers wear, which is a much more socially acceptable form of rantage.

My first view of this girl was from behind, as I was creeping up a hill in a line of traffic and she was walking up the same hill. It looked like she was wearing a red plaid bodystocking with a black loin-cloth-style butt flap. That's why she caught my attention. For one thing, I figured a bodystocking would not be very warm in the chilly East County morning, or pass muster for school decency rules, but it was mostly because it was bright red plaid. Bright red plaid framing a large black rectangle hanging from her waist like a flag on a balcony.

As I got closer I realized that it was, in fact, thick leggings tucked into her sneakers, but the butt flap thing was still there, still just as weird. In fact, as I got closer I was able to read the message scrawled accross the rectangle of black canvas. It said GLOBAL THREAT in a scratchy spattered-paint looking font.

What type of fashion statement is being made by wearing a banner on your butt that says "GLOBAL THREAT"? I wonder if she got mocked for this outfit, or if her friends thought it was great, and themselves started to wear butt-banners with snappy slogans on them.

It's official: I'm a fuddy duddy. I'm bewildered by the clothing choices of teenagers. Though I still reckon it's ok to be bewildered by this particular fashion statement, it's only getting really bad if I start freaking out at kids with nose rings and spiky hair, or comment that someone needs a haircut and a nice shirt from the GAP to smarten them up a bit.