Palyne

I’ve discovered that when I post something, I tend to edit it a lot right after. But the RSS feed takes the first version. So a lot of what people are seeing via RSS is a rather old version of a post. Bummer. Guess I should make sure it’s more like I want it first. Somehow though, seeing a post in the context of the real page makes a difference.

I’ve also discovered that although WordPress says it will not import posts it already grabbed from another blog… it lies. It does. And then you have to manually get rid of every ‘tag’ that it changed into a category. And then you have to go add tags for every new post. And then you have to manually delete all the old posts. Thank goodness the first blog I tried this on was my Psiche, instead of Red Cairo which has vastly more posts! So from now on, I’m just going to have to copy a post I’ve made wherever, and add it to this blog (rather than weekly/monthly ‘importing’ from all the other blogs).

I guess technically, I don’t post that often that this should be a problem. Usually I am posting mostly on one blog at a time, as there’s only so much time in life for focus, and my blogging follows my focus.

OK maybe this is a little materialist, but if you knew what grunge I’ve been living in and for how long you’d see why I’m fairly excited about my decision to find a way to get myself a decent bedroom for my birthday in a few weeks.

I’m getting this quilt. I love the colors, and the velvet/satin mix. The patterns could be better or more random personally, but I really like it for the colors and texture. It’s at seventhavenue.com for $70 (pillow shams are like $17ea or something). My bedroom is a small dark grungy pit and I think it’s long past time I feng shui’d it into something more like I want to live in.

Read the rest of this entry »

(I’m reviving this blog, and about time.)

OK, so lately I’ve been doing that very odd thing that people did before they had gyms and personal trainers: I’ve been exercising by doing something constructive.

I have to rake, then mow, then weed-eat, the property. That’s a lot of work for me. Granted, I live in a tract home, but it’s still a lot of work. I have to stop and rest on the porch bench for awhile between each part. But I’m getting better at it.

I worked (and paid my housekeeper to work) on the garage for months now and I can actually walk all the way through it to “get to” things like the lawn mower, tools, etc. — what a concept! This is great and makes doing things a lot easier. Used to be that after DP moved in I had no idea where to find anything (and when I found it, it would invariably have been left out to rust), and the effort of even getting a couple tools to DO something was just off-putting. Now I’m starting to get my life and property organized again — I spent over a year since he left doing almost nothing besides working, coding (though not much of that anymore), and working on cleaning out the house, yards, and garage.

I have regular watering, weeding, and just finished all the amending and planting, for my backyard garden. It’s a standing garden which is great, but that also means you’re doing stuff leaning over with a hand trowel, not a tiller and a shovel, and trust me, two-year weeds as thick as my wrist and three feet deep are still hard work. It was abandoned for two years and I’m just restoring it this spring. Still much work to do on the overall area but at least the beds are planted.

I spent half the day today shoveling half my potting mix — this is a dumptruck load in my driveway of a ’soilless mix’ that is spaghum peat moss, pine fines, perlite, and something else I forget — into containers (20 – 70 qt containers) to add to the garden collection. It started raining huge drops, but the minute I finished my mad rush to cover it all–2 minutes, if that–the rain ceased.

Got distracted with work, kid, shopping etc. I’m considering trying to mow the lawn before the storm arrives since it’s already too long again and I won’t be able to mow for a couple days after it rains. Trying to start the lawnmower nearly injures me so it’s more a matter of my courage than my energy at this point. In my attempt at procrastination, I’m blogging instead.

***

I haven’t been weight lifting for a long time. I’d like to re-start that. I had a long list of issues that interfered–by which I mean, interfered with my personal priorities, because obviously, had I wanted to do it more than I didn’t, I would have.

I’ve been walking off and on, with the kid. My city has a walking park with a 1-mile track. It’s surprising how fast cardio facility increases if you just move regularly. I remember realizing this decades ago with bicycling, that it would only take several days in a row of doing it to move from so wiped out I had to stop ten times and gasp for my life, to doing vastly more, faster, with no rests, and being ok with it.

At right is a pic of the kid (11-Apr-08) at the walking park with me. She’s wearing my severely oversized (for her) sweatshirt.

The cardio-facility fades fast though. If I don’t move much for a couple days, it seems like I lose a whole lot and have to spend a couple days recovering facility I had previously.

Eating crappy food takes me down fast, since it not only adds oxygen problems (gluten foods give me asthma which worsens sleep apnea so I’m O2 deprived), and some asthma, but all the water-bloating that goes with eating a lot of carbs too, which affects how limber I am, how stressed my heart is from bending over, etc. My “fitness level” can change radically in two days for better or worse just depending on whether I’m eating steak and eggs vs. pasta and tacos.

I have cooking goals this week, like roasting a whole chicken and using the carcass for a soup; whipping egg whites stiff for a variety of experimental, vaguely breadish recipes; making more cocoa coconut oil/cream bites; and I got a few different “Black Angus” burgers and steaks at Super Walmart frozen section I want us to try. Tonight we must do stir fry and use our broccoli and colored bells before they go bad, with chicken and some gluten-free soy sauce.

My eating goals are mostly to refocus. All in all, my eating has sucked off and on for the last — well actually, for about the last 17 months to be honest — but fortunately that means it is “ok” about half the time, I haven’t gained any weight back. I still weigh 375 on LC (390 if I fall off–I hold about 15lbs of water weight for carbs if I’m not LC) which is sort of miraculous given how much crappy eating and lack of exercise I’ve had a lot of the time.

My exercise goals for the moment are still centered on the reality around me:

• Get all the soilless mix into all my containers, which means shoveling and wheelbarrowing.
• Get all the containers with drainage holes in them (not on the bottom but on the side near the bottom) which means a lotta time with the drill. (Yes. Smart people do that part FIRST. That is simply not how the timeline worked out.)
• Get all the weeds that ‘recovered’ in the garden totally out of there.
• Get the front lawn mowed and edged again. It’s a weekly job in Spring. This will be two weeks if I wait till next Saturday but it will be forest by then so I can’t wait that long.
• Get the back yard raked and the bazillion twigs (from arm-thick and 10′ long to zillions of finger-size twigs, from the old ice storm) outta there so I can finally mow and weed-eat back there, before the grass is taller than me.

There is a big long list of OTHER stuff I ALSO need to do — but not this week.

I’ve been reading about lectin/protein intolerances and I really want to make a bigger effort to get totally off gluten. Although I’m not giving up cheese at this point, I’d like to reduce the amount of dairy I intake as the protein, caseine, I react with craving to which tells me I have some allergenic reaction to it. (It doesn’t escape me, the irony that I spent my whole life eating two primary foods that I am probably literally intolerant to. It’s no surprise I’m huge but it’s rather amazing I’m not dead already.)

I also need to get back to my note-taking on the Gary Taubes book ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories’ as well since even looking at the book as I walk past tends to inspire me back to eating meat/eggs/veggies. Boy that book was convincing. If I were on the jury, some people would already be hung! The man may be the first person who can make even my tendency for “overkill” look pitiful and weak. It’s only for really good readers who don’t mind really dense material, but it’s awesome for those.

And… I want to do another beginning of weight lifting. I slightly injured myself the last time, plus my back room kept getting one of the 8 cats into it (two know how to open the doorknob!) and using it as a litterbox, so even when cleaned up you just couldn’t be in it due to the smell, which killed my enthusiasm frankly. The cats are going 100% outside as soon as this storm cycle is over so the horrendous flea situation we had last summer will not be repeated. Too many cats act like a wild pride–I am still waiting for DP to come get his so I only have my 4. (As usual, even long after I get rid of him again, still in some way he is managing to muck up some portion of my life! Oh well. I do love the cats, of course.) Anyway so within a week max I should have my “weight lifting room” restored.

The TV/VCR/DVD is there now. I got rid of the whole media tower, center, TV, and all our VCR tapes (many hundreds) not long ago on freecycle. We have DVDs only now, in a couple fat zipper books, and what visual stuff we have is in the back room, as it hasn’t been used for much else.

A coworker sent me a Christian “walking” exercise DVD, something to do indoors if it’s raining or something. That was nice of her. Also low-fat cookbooks. Apparently she either did not understand lowcarb that I mentioned repeatedly, or she is hoping to convert me, heh. It still surprises me that people think lowcarb is nothing but bacon and butter; several lowcarbers I know all but live on chicken and fish and broccoli and asparagus and things like that.

… that would not be me.

Anyway, I’m going to start posting on this blog hopefully weekly and talking about what exercise I have done, planning, and any subject matter that relates to exercise or my experience in that area. I think I’ve waxed on enough now…

… I have to go mow the lawn.

PJ

This is just a chatty post to catch up a bit on recent life.

It’s going fairly well here in nowhere Oklahoma. It’s spring, which aside from Autumn is the most glorious time of the year. It ranges from super-blue sky with super-green everything and flowering trees, to awesome thunderstorms and pouring rain.

In the spring here, everything grows. This includes the 1,029,392,877 little tree seeds that have distributed themselves all over the landscape from every tree in the neighborhood. I’m the Maple Killer: I ripped out dozens of maple tree starts from a small mulched area the other night. This is definitely Ozark territory here in the NE corner, not the plains. Oh, and that’s not counting every weed that ever considered taking up residence in my landscape, especially my lawn. By the time I got my mower started, my lawn — along with much of the city — was a good 12-20″ long in places. I say ‘in places’ because I don’t actually have a lawn. I have some very interesting weeds which, when mowed, and slightly at a distance, give the illusion of a lawn. I’m not complaining. It’s green, it grows, I mow it, what’s not to love?

I managed to get all my official garden beds planted, no thanks to killing my own seedlings (never mind how, it’s just too stupid). In the beds, which are 24-32″ high (it’s a ’standing’ cinderblock garden, see some old pics here), I’ve got something like:

half a dozen red bell pepper
half a dozen orange bell pepper
nine green bell pepper (most of which I wait till red to pick)
nine jalapeno pepper
a couple italian peppers (sort of a cross between a bell and an anaheim)
eight cayenne peppers
(did you notice… I like peppers? I’d have more but the local selection of seedlings was pathetic.)
eight roma tomatoes
one cherry tomato
one oregano
two basil (standard)
half a dozen daikon radish (all that sprouted, from old seed)
around 10 shallot sets
around 60 garlic sets
around 200 yellow, white and red onion sets
about 25 each of normal, japanese long white, and red, scallions
and that’s about all there is room for in the beds.

I plant close, ’sort of’ in a square-foot-gardening style, but not THAT close… about 1.5-2′ between peppers and small/determinate tomatoes.

I didn’t plant anything on the arch trellising this season, because I still need to tear out the odd square little beds that DP (as my lowcarb girlfriends call him, my Ex) created, and use their cinderblocks to make permanent beds between the arches. That is down the road some… there is only so much time in life, and let me tell you, it does not take much hauling of 30# cinderblocks before your hands and fingers hurt and you’re weary, and this is probably even for people in good physical shape, which I am definitely not.

I do, however, have the containers left. I had to buy an entire new spate of containers this year, as the recent ice storm that wiped out 70% of the trees in my city (including mine. They are leafing out–their shredded remains–but at some point I’ll have to pay a small fortune to have them cut down and replaced, as they are trashed) also wiped out my containers, which had actually survived five years of winter outside without even a crack until then, but they literally shattered and cracked and broke all over with that freeze. These are big, 16-40 gallon (varies) size “tub” like containers you can get at dollar stores and walmart.

The rain and wind have delayed delivery, but hopefully Thursday I will get the “soilless premium potting mix” from the local soil company (they sell mulch, rock, you name it), a dump truck with a scoop is going to drop it in my driveway, then guess who gets to shovel it all into containers and wheelbarrow them around the property. I will be in slightly better shape when this is all over, that’s for sure.

Last week, a friend online sent me some clothes and shoes in my size and some quality cat food. Free stuff! Awesome. My boyfriend sent me a movie (”Kama Sutra” – do you think he’s trying to tell me something…?). A coworker sent me an exercise video and two cookbooks. My dad gave me a whole bunch of DVDs, me and Ry will be watching “The Golden Compass” tonight. And yesterday I got a $100 gift card from my boss. So it’s been a good time for the influence of others the last week or so, for sure.

Thanks to the gift card yesterday, I was able to go to a local nursery and buy about four dozen seedlings for all the containers (from the big tubs to lots of hanging flower pots). A dozen are flowers; a dozen are herbs; a couple dozen are some more veggies. Anaheim chili pepper, mole chili pepper, hungarian wax (hot banana) pepper, couple more italian peppers, a golden tomato, cherry tomato, some more roma tomato, some more cayenne pepper. (Fresh cayenne are my fave peppers, although there are several in that class that are nearly indistinguishable from one another and they’re all good.) This Friday (payday) I hope to buy whatever the last things needed for this year’s garden: maybe more containers (not sure), and a bunch of hose and a good punch, a manifold and timer for the backyard, and a couple more fancy-spray nozzles for the garden hoses. From that point on, all I need is a couple scoops (dump truck full) of new cedar mulch and a LOT of incredibly hard work, and by the time Fall arrives, when it’s time to tear stuff out and clean up for the winter, I’ll finally be done with the stuff I should have had done by the arrival of spring, heh!

Ry had her sixth grade chorus concert last night, so we piled into the city’s big-brag fully-restored landmark Coleman Theatre for it. She’s so adorable it just melts my heart.

Meanwhile, my friend X is having a rather severe problem in her house. Her husband and both her children — now 10 and 11 — are quite psychic in the ‘medium’ sort of way, although her husband is a rationalist who works very hard to stay in denial of this. They began with a number of random occurrences and knocking and things like this, human-shaped shadows visible only to the three of them (X’s oblivious), etc. They believed they had some kind of ghost. I told them to talk to Archangel Michael and ask for his assistance in helping someone move on, and they did. Her father died as all this was happening, which probably didn’t help, except that it restored some sense of benevolence to it all.

Not long later, this amped up into Amityville territory. First stuff started moving. I’ve had this effect myself during my bewilderness era and I know how crazy-making it can be. A dresser fell on her daughter (a bird-boned sort) several times. (And no, this is NOT like child abuse projected or anything like that. Stuff started falling and flying all over the place regularly, all four of them reported it to me separately at times.) The knocking increased. The out-of-corner-of-eye visuals increased. Writing started appearing on the mirrors. The TV remote control constantly vanished and would appear on the ceiling fan in the kids’ room, which nobody there can reach without a ladder. They could all be sitting in the living room, all is well, the cat walks out of the room, and runs back in 10 seconds later–covered in mayonnaise or something and very unhappy about it.

One time her husband got so pissed about the remote control he duct taped it and CHAINED IT so it couldn’t go anywhere. The cat got coated with something again, his bottle of scotch vanished and appeared stuck in the dirt upside down and open in the backyard after having been poured everywhere, and after searching, they’d just given up looking for the vanished remote when they found it — in the butter container in the door of the fridge. The little girl would sometimes wake up with her long hair wound up and ‘hooked’ on this tiny hook in the wall above her bed.

They kept taking the kids to sleep with them because they were all worried, but even when they do, the apparitions and stuff continue off and on, and her husband is often woken up by someone poking him HARD — physically — on the shoulder, even though he makes sure and nobody is touching him that he can SEE, yet it’s 100% physical and once he felt a whole hand slide down his arm. (Grossed him out.)

They called the Oklahoma branch of some kind of ghost like society that has a TV show. Useless. These people had a huge stack of paperwork that took X a really long time to fill out. They show up, they set up a camera for ONE HOUR, and they leave–just leaving all the paperwork they worked so hard to prepare. X asked if there was someone they knew who could clear houses of this kind of thing and they only said, not in this region. And this was all just really annoying, frustrating, aside from the occasional things that seemed like a potential threat to the kids, until recently when

The little girl can see and hear a spirit there. She says it says that her name is Sabrina and she died in a fire. She heard another who said her name was Debra, and she was several generations ahead of Sabrina. After the prayers with Michael, Debra went away. Meanwhile, they’ve now progressed to some impressive EVP (electronic voice phenomenon). Sometimes on the telephone, AFTER someone hangs up, there is a voice. Allegedly there is a spirit named Tim, an angry man who says he set the fire that killed Sabrina. Debra says that she is trying to help Sabrina ‘go to the light’ but Tim doesn’t want to let her go. Sometimes Sabrina quits talking and when asked why says that “he will hurt her” and then there’s sounds like a hard slap and her crying out. Meanwhile, they were all trying to keep this quiet — except for hoping the ghost hunter people might have some clue — because they don’t want anybody to think they are crazy, obviously, and if you tell someone that a small dresser threw itself on your kid, they’re probably going to think it’s child abuse and that’d be a total nightmare. So they’ve been suffering in silence about all this for awhile.

Recently, they got some third party verification. The little girl had been on the telephone with a little girl who lives near me. When her little girl hung up, a voice came on the line, and the other little girl stayed on as a result. She gave the phone to her mother, who actually heard it. It was ‘Tim’ and he was foully cursing and threatening and saying, I can’t recall, but something like they couldn’t take Sabrina I think. X felt tremendously validated that someone outside their family had finally experienced this stuff.

She tells me because I’ve had poltergeist phenomenon and I believe her–and the most unbelievable parts, for anybody who’s had it, are the most believable because that’s really how it works–like you don’t usually see stuff floating through the air from point A to point C, it’s just that something is at point A and a micro-instant later it’s at point C, for example. (Moved through time, not space.)

Recently, her little girl was sleeping in the living room while she watched TV real late one night, not more than 10 feet from her, and in the space of an hour, when she woke up, part of one eyebrow had been shaved, her upper lip hurt, and she had tiny razor marks around her legs. Not cuts, but scrapes. Now, this seems as impossible as every other poltergeist thing seems: X was RIGHT THERE, though not looking, and her daughter was wearing clothes!–and this happened “under” them–and we suspect the sudden pain was what woke her up. She called out to her mom who said what is it baby? and looked back at her and instantly noticed a whole big rectangle missing from one of her eyebrows. This event scared the hell out of X, who sought out every razor and bundled them up and hid them in a closet somewhere, and made her husband SO pissed that he stomped around the house cursing at Tim and telling him he was a balless coward for picking on little girls and why didn’t he pick on HIM instead. He’s been trying to harrass Tim into spending his energy on him rather than the kid.

Now, poltergeist activity is nearly always associated with children, and both of hers are near 11, which is about the age it usually kicks in. The family watches all kinds of spirit-related crap on TV, like Buffy and Angel and so on. I assumed, initially, that this was just PK activity, and that the slightly younger brother, despite that both the children are very healthy and happy, that this might be some subconscious PK acted out toward his sister. But I don’t think so anymore. The whole repetition of the spirit-stuff, along with the writing, voices, and the poor damn cat LOL, the endless issue with small items especially remote controls, is a little too constant.

I told her, you “pay” attention. Every bit of attention you guys give this is just feeding it energy, period. QUIT! Ignore it. Marginalize it. Don’t give it any free energy. But of course over time, more and more, they could not ignore it, even though she says they tried that for awhile, along with prayer and so on. At this point they’re willing to save money (they’re pretty poor) for an exorcist if they only knew where to find one and it’d have to be someone that works on ‘houses’. She tells me there is so much stuff so constantly that I wouldn’t even believe her if she bothered trying to recount it all. I probably would, but I know what she means.

I was so irked about the razor incident that I seriously considered stomping over to her house and seeing if I could call Michael and the spirit and do something about it all myself. But at this point, I’ve been out of mental work so long except spottily, I can hardly pay attention through a brief chakra meditation, never mind something that major, with an energy so turbulent. In other words, I don’t think I’m qualified, and I think as a result it might be dangerous. I’m ticked though. I want to be qualified to deal with that. It is inappropriate. I feel the need to “facilitate the adjustment” of the situation. I always said I knew the first time I saw the Thoth tarot deck that “Adjustment” was my card, and funny enough things often feel like that to me, like I simply feel some inner need to bring things into balance via adjustment. I know all the cosmic wiccans are the Empress and High Priestess and stuff like that, so Adjustment seemed a little disappointing and unglam by comparison, but it was a gut-knowing, what can you do, I didn’t consciously choose.

(It just occurs to me that maybe the tarot is a map of humanity the way The Four or the Tree of Life is, and so maybe every person has one card that basically they fall most into the pattern of. Hmmmn.)

I recently seriously acid-burned my fingers by spending like 7 hours cutting peppers and garlic. They hurt so bad I thought they would split open or something. I was talking to Nero (a guide) about it, and he made it go away totally, the pain, for about ten minutes. I shifted my attention and it came back. I was pretty damn impressed that he could do that though. Or maybe I did it but either way it was impressive. (By the next morning they were ok.)

It’s raining, supposed to thunderstorm today. The back seat of my car is stuffed with four small flats of seedlings. The thunder is rolling and I think I’ll do something constructive here. That about sums up my recent life. Mostly I’ve been doing archmeds — or trying, denial puts me to sleep often lately! — and gardening and spending time with the kid. Viewing… barely… still working on getting ‘regular’ time for that. Around “having a life” that’s kind of hard. It’s a matter of priorities, and viewing is so important to me, and yet… so are other things. Ah, the dichotomy…

PJ

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 19 April 2007

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking the last few days. Ever since the archetype talked to me about time, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. About time, about space, and the brain-crunching idea of them not being separate really at all.

Along with this, me and my best friend have been having conversations about my reality. Reminding me of all the stuff I know, that Seth would tell me, but that I’ve kind of moved out of thinking about for a long time. Talking about my physical reality, and what it reflects. Maybe me being uptight. Cluttered. And maybe “hanging on to things,” causing a sort of “reality clogging”. Maybe anal retentive can be a feng shui effect too. HA HA.

o0o Epiphanies

Today I had a sort of epiphany. Well not like a life-changing thing, but definitely a get-my-act-together kind of thing.

It all started over a chat room.

Since 1993 the TKR forum members have asked for a chat. For a long time I was adamant I wouldn’t have one. I didn’t have time to have it moderated, I would not allow the head-trip mind-F*** BS that a stupid number of people in the field online lived for in chat rooms, I wouldn’t put up with the ‘trolls’ which were actually viewers from all kinds of sources that resented Any God But Their Own, etc. I was cranky and snappy about it and that was that.

But eventually, some of the TKR Admins themselves were asking. I have a soft spot for all of them. Without them I’d have to be spending all my time reading boards and carrying on monologues. They make that project possible and in doing so, free up a whole lot of my time. (Which is ridiculously limited even with their help.) I want to do anything I can to help them or make them happy.

So, at the time, this was maybe 2-3 years ago, I went out and looked for chat options. I refused the easier stuff, like IRC, because I wanted something that we could control. I once vowed — and I still maintain — that I will never again run a project that is fully unmoderated, that allows evil abusers to deliberately stalk and destroy the entire project for everybody. I feel I owe it to anybody who spends their time in anything I run, to at least make sure I can somewhat protect them and their contributions from destruction, by being able to bounce/ban “trolls.” That the worst trolls are usually allegedly viewers themselves is one of the great ironies of this field, but never mind.

The affordable options for software that allowed privacy, could be run from my own site (though tying into their server), could have rooms made/dropped on command, could do moderated “guest interview” chats, etc. were few. In the end I settled on a java-based chat hosted in the UK for around 30 bucks a month plus a hefty set up fee. We had the chat room up for awhile. I don’t know how long, maybe a year, 18 months? (My time sense is completely distorted. Never believe me when I estimate anything related to time.) We had a few guest chats. I was busy and didn’t get off my butt to make more of them happen, but they were fun and interesting.

We usually had a few people show up on Monday nights after the Missions at TKR got feedback. It didn’t get much use otherwise though. I made an option in the dojo software, for users to schedule a chat, or to say when someone would be around, but there wasn’t much interest it appeared. This could be partly because the people expressing interest were mostly on the forum, while the chat you actually had to get to through the dojo.

After what seemed like eons, I realized how much money I had dished out for something seldom used — and the software itself kind of drove me nuts anyway — and so I just canceled the chatserver and figured “eventually, I’ll do something else.”

In keeping with the laws of Murphy, the minute I canceled it, all kinds of people seemed to want it. It’s like something in the universe senses the void. It’s like swearing celibacy and then watching people just pour out of the woodwork who are hot to have you. The irony is downright funny. Sort of.

o0o Time marches on.

So it’s been a long time and we haven’t had a chat room. I decided on what I wanted to get back in October of last year, and made plans. But it cost a bit. About $500-600, plus another $100 for the first year of the chatserver hosting. If I couldn’t swing at least half the total amount up front there was no point to doing it, so I kept putting it off, not having that much at one time.

Time marches on. “Real Soon Now” in my world has the subjectivity of my time attached to it. This could mean in 5 minutes or maybe in 5 years. A friend once told me it was one of the most annoying things about me, but I feel sure he left out several far more interesting options.

Meanwhile, another sort of parallel issue that ties into this epiphany has been going on. Since way-back-when — we are talking end of 1995 now — I’ve been regularly faced with the opportunity to make some money from something related to RV, and refused.

o0o MoneyMoneyMoneyMoney

For just over a couple of years, it was because of what I considered the ‘honor of the sensei’ — which is to say, people would offer to come give me cash if I’d just spend a full day letting them pick my brain, and I had an infant and no real job and a husband that didn’t work and I desperately needed it, but I felt that anybody worth teaching “should have a real teacher” — that being one of the ‘formal’ instructors I knew and had studied with — and I felt that it would also be unfair to the teachers to take money they should get.

This was a real drama queen martyr thing in retrospect, because the degree of my need, the casual one-off nature of the options, and the obscene amount of money that RV teachers were making off the public anyway, should have made all that angst a moot point. But no, get me on any kind of kick where I think any decision is about the ‘honor’ of something and you might as well give up, I’m ten times as stubborn. Sigh. Sometimes I think my character was written by John Irving — it’s like the kind of thing you’ve got to have a sense of humor and a penchant for sociology to appreciate.

TKR and the dojo’s software developed, and the time demands put into it kept up. It’s been reprogrammed and redesigned several times, and expanded continually. I’ve tried to keep a constant hand in TKR’s communications, as much for the insanity it keeps out as a side effect, as for anything I might contribute. The amount of hours eventually ‘averaged’ to like 40 a week at least every other week — evenings and into the night and all weekend generally, for eons. The amount of money I was spending just on that project alone, for server rentals, programming help at times, applets or software plugins on occasion, domain names, etc. — not counting other things like Firedocs or many other RV domains that I maintain — reached into the thousands of dollars.

My friends started really leaning on me about it. They thought it was insane and ridiculous that anybody would seem to basically dedicate their entire life outside work and kid to something and get no compensation for it — their theory was that at the least, I should charge enough so I didn’t have to do all that work for free AND pay for it. But making stuff available was the whole point of TKR, so I didn’t care much. I made a decent income at my job, not great but enough that I could afford to fund it all with being dependent on anybody else. The politics and marketing media and business competition in the RV field, not counting disinformation, misinformation, mis-education (enough of that to span the globe several times), cult indoctrination and more made an island of sanity for RV — a FREE one — critical in my opinion. I wanted it open and out there.

o0o Donations and Drama

So then in the early days of TKR, the idea of a “donation” button was brought up. At first, I think I just refused, because I didn’t want to feel beholden to others. I didn’t want anybody to ever be able to say, “Hey, I donated money to you, how dare you let my name or opinion get dissed in your project?” I already had a rather surreal problem with one trainer thinking it was my moral duty to defend his reputation from the people he’d worked so hard to ruin it with, and the thought of that expanding to cover anybody who wanted to donate 20 bucks nearly gave me hives just thinking about it.

Eventually, when the topic came up again, and more people had commented to me about such things privately, I decided to consider it. But then I realized that this might not work. Due to marrying a foreigner who never got legal here and some related issues bigger than anything you want to hear about (trust me), I owe the IRS money. This means that if I had actual INCOME — like, dependable income from a job or client — they could (they do) levy it. I had this idea that they would hunt down every person who sent me five dollars and send them all my personal info and a 1/4″ stack of paper with threats about what’d happen if they didn’t fill it out. Which I might add they did to several of my clients long ago, which contributed to them not being clients and greatly complicated my paying the debt. (Brilliant, they are not.) So at that point I refused because I didn’t know enough about it (now I know more) and I worried that debt might cause some problems if I took donations.

More time passed. More money… more working through the night… and the subject would come up now and again, usually in private correspondence. I would shrug it off. It’s ok, I can handle it.

o0o

Recently, I dished out a few hundred for the first almost-half of the chatroom stuff. I was going to open it even with the limitations it had, stuff I hadn’t bought yet for customizing, but it turns out these “emoticons” and “preset comments” and “avatars” in it are so incredibly stupid, it is just downright humiliating to even be associated with.

So with a sigh I realized it could be a few months before I had the money for the rest of it (so I could change them), given the way things are going in my life lately, and everyone would just have to wait. Yes, that meant I’d be paying monthly on a chatserver nobody used, but we’re talking about my reputation being proxy to totally moronic media. That seemed more important. Apparently if I can’t be cool I will take my ball and … not chat.

So to my surprise, on the TKR board, the very next day (he must be psychic!) Daz asks for a chat room. I say sure, and explain it’s sort of coming but has to wait on a bit more funds. And he suggests — as has happened so many times before — that I put up a donation button and let people donate to the project for it.

I wrote a message that I didn’t post, that said, “No, it’s ok. It’ll be here eventually.”

And then just before I clicked on the send button, it all hit me.

This is my conversation with myself, in personal vs. Devil’s Advocate (DA) form.

o0o Inner Guide (DA) Gets CheekyDA: They can’t donate why?

PJ: I don’t need it.

DA: If you can’t do what they want because you don’t have the money, you need it.

PJ: I don’t need to ask others for help.

DA: Woo woo. So this is about your ego? I thought it was about a chat room.

PJ: Well I can take care of it, it’ll just take awhile.

DA: It’s already been awhile. A LONG while. So what you’re really saying is, “Only I, The Official Martyr(tm), can contribute to this project.” Aren’t you the one always talking about how it’s the members that make the project what it is? And now you’re saying you won’t let the members help make it what they want it to be…. because why, again?

PJ: I don’t want to make money off online RV. I’ve seen it corrupt every person it touches.

DA: Who said you’re making money off it? At this point all the donations you’ll ever get times 1,000 couldn’t cover the amount of money and time you’ve been putting into RV stuff online since late 1995. You’ll be lucky if once a year you get enough donations to cover a month of your overall RV online expenses. The expenses you pay aren’t business expenses, they are personal. If someone pays part of that, it’s a gift. It’s a tiny drop in the bucket that might help. More importantly, it might help the members actually contribute to the things important to them. Something you say you want, in general.

PJ: Yeah but then some bonehead will be saying that I’m doing it for money.

DA: First, that’s just too stupid to qualify, given everything you’ve put in the last dozen years. It would make them look bad more than you if they did. Second, this means that rather than basing your decisions on the many people in projects you’re part of, or the people who most like you and want to help you or help the project, you’re basing your decisions on some invisible, assumed person who doesn’t like you and might say bad things about you. What kind of sense does that make? If anybody influences your decisions it should be your friends, not your enemies. Besides, your enemies already diss you, who cares if they add something else to their rants? Why should you care anyway? They’re off your radar. Live your life.

PJ: I guess I just want to feel like I am not indebted and beholden to people.

DA: Then maybe you should build your next social club in a cave. Listen, you’re the one always going on about how you only build the shell and the people are the heart and soul of it and it’s their interests and input that drive it. It isn’t about you being beholden. The point is, it isn’t about YOU. Get over yourself already! Nobody is doing you a favor. Maybe a little, maybe IF they like you, but maybe it’s a whole lot more about just wanting to feel like they’re contributing to something they appreciate online. Maybe they only visit because of someone or something else and they can’t stand you. That doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate the project. You’re filtering everything as if it has to come through the doorway of your ego. Miss “I must be independent, and honorable!” That just doesn’t really apply to donations. It might apply to you selling 1-900 RV services, or ranting about aliens and doom on late night radio, but a “donation to an RV project” is NOT a statement on your ego, morality, competence, independence, or anything else. Because it’s not a statement about YOU, ok?

… I thought about this for awhile. The part that really bugs me about my inner voice (and I have pleaded, lately, for my Inner Guide to be more present in my conscious life, and I suspect this is his doing, as he is often making me see things about myself I don’t want to see), is that it makes me realize what a totally conceited autocrat I can be sometimes.

So I didn’t post the message and instead went back to work for a bit while I mulled it over. I started thinking about the talks my buddy and I have been having about the clutter in my house and what the archetype said about time, space, clutter and feng shui, and I suddenly realized:

o0o It’s all connected.

All the crap I hang on to that I don’t really “need” terribly, that causes clutter in my house; all the issues I won’t let go of that cause me such resistance to ever “being vulnerable” or “letting someone help me” (because it would make me vulnerable — the Narrator talked to me about that years ago) — it’s connected.

And I realized that what it amounts to, I am not “letting anything in” — not just ‘donations’ but really, the whole larger picture of being “acceptive” of how reality interacts with me — and I am also not “letting anything out” — like the house which, despite being 1.7 billion times better now that my ex is gone, is still way too cluttered for my taste.

And then, in one of those perspective-switches that are so right they irk me, I remembered what my friend was saying about the clutter: that it’s a poverty mentality, of course.

If you really trust you’ll have what you need in life, you let things go, you let them find use with others, you don’t hoard and store things that you never use or for really long periods of time. Everything around you, he reminded me, is literally a reminder (”an idea incarnate”, I thought) of what you think you lack, of what you think you won’t be able to get again when you need it.

Instead of being surrounded by plenty, what I am really surrounded by is monuments to lack.

DA: There’s no FLOW. It’s a fear-based response. It’s a curled-up-in-shell-of-safety response. If you had faith in yourself, in your reality, if you could “ALLOW” — the big issue for you — you would let things flow from you, and flow to you as well, and it wouldn’t be any big issue at all.

I wondered if that might relate to the extra body weight that is such a bother to get off me. Not allowing, not releasing, storing and hoarding. Kinda sounds like it huh.

I’m really sort of astounded by the insight. Not that being a bonehead is new to me, I realize this about myself regularly, but I found today particularly insightful, albeit in a bit of a bruising yet freeing way.

o0o Breaking The Habit

I’ve decided that I’m going to change that. I’m going to improve myself. I’m going to be more of the kind of person I want to be, and I’m going to reshape my life to make it happen.

So I came to two conclusions.

First. I am going through my house bit by bit and I am getting rid of everything that I do not use regularly and/or that is not so hard to acquire (or needed in emergency) that I can bear it.

My bathroom has like 15 towels. There are two of us. There’s so many they end up all over the counter and floor, the stack toppling off the shelf. They are out of here shortly. I’ll save the 4-5 that are big thick beach towels is all. I have a big wall cupboard and an oversized sink cabinet that are stuffed with stupid things I never use and probably 30 bottles of stuff. It’s out of here. My chronically crowded, cluttered bathroom has enough storage space, given there’s two of us, that it ought to be nearly zen minimalist. Really, this should be applied to my whole house.

Make it so! I will LET THINGS GO.

Second. I am going to make a page for donations on the dojo site, and put buttons on my various websites, and anybody who wants to donate can.

I’ll let people spec out what project/thing it’s for if they want, and I’ll keep a public tally of everything in/out so folks know what it’s really for. There is no excuse for acting like a martyr and there is no excuse for keeping viewers anywhere, let alone members of a member-driven project, from actually helping shape their project or viewing stuff online if they so choose. It shouldn’t even be a big deal and it might be helpful to me AND to the projects.

Make it happen! I will LET THINGS IN.

And maybe, with a little more “energy flow” of incoming and outgoing and “allowing”, I can better deal with the stored clutter in my house — and on my body — and maybe, just maybe, it might even have some feng shui reality side-effect on my available time. Which is as limited as — surprise — my available money at the moment.

It is actually hard. I feel all this inner resistance to both things. But I think this is what personal growth is all about, is about recognizing your limitations and proactively doing something to cure them and bring balance to yourself.

I’ll put the donation page up tomorrow. For now, off to clean the house!

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 19 April 2006

Although I grant I’ve had an obsession with science for most of my life, dating back to voracious reading of everything about (or from) George Washington Carver and J.B. Rhine in my school years, it really doesn’t get any better than the last near-decade or so, when thanks to my incursion into the study of Remote Viewing and its science, history, theory and practice, I’ve met a whole bunch of very cool people who are both brilliant and down to earth.

One of my faves is Dr. Edwin C. May, aka Eddie when nobody else is around, who over the years has taken a lot of time to be kind to an uncredentialed but very serious layman with a million questions.

He recently got Skype “video” — wow! It’s so cool!! (No. You will never, ever see me on this. — I’m shy!) — and today when he skype-ftp’d a quick run of a graph of current rough prestim research results, and an explanation of it all to boot, I just couldn’t resist grabbing a screenshot to show y’all. Now I was tempted not to post this, since it sounds a bit like name-dropping, but then decided what the hell, this is my daily life and this is my blog and they go together, right?

Anyway, with great guys like him willing to be virtual-professors now and then, how can the science of psi NOT be interesting? Now if only I had all the requisite braincells and background math to absorb it, I’d be better deserving I imagine. But at least I don’t lack enthusiasm, heh! (Thus demonstrating my long-held theory on social chivalry: that if one can’t be useful, they can at least be decorative. Or in my case, perhaps, at least supportive!)

(Thanks for permission ECM. Yeah, next time I’ll warn you so you can pose!)

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 18 April 2006

Demonstrating a very different kind of entanglement on a California sunny day, here’s a photo of Dr. Edwin May (physics) and Dr. Dean Radin (electrical engineering) outside of IONS, April 18, 2006.

Dr. Radin has a new book just released, Entangled Minds : Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality [website] [[amazon.com] [quotes about it], which I imagine is going to add to the waterfall of drool I see invoked instantly in the public and media over anything containing the Oooh-Aaah word “quantum.”

I should mention that Radin’s previous book, The Conscious Universe : The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena [website] [amazon.com] was a fabulous read. So I expect this book will be as well.

(Thanks to the good docs for permission to post this photo.)

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 16 April 2006

Groovy pic eh? April 16, 2006.

At left, in the shirt louder than New York, is physicist Dr. Edwin C. May, who is very conservative about psi and science (and not about much else). Then at right, looking suspiciously laid back (if not downright conservative… next to Ed!) is Stephan A. Schwartz, who by nature is as dynamic (particularly about psi) as Ed’s shirt.

Dr. May’s currently working on physiologically (cardio) measured pre-stimulus-response trials. This means, “The experiments where they demonstrate, by measuring your heart rate compared to random sounds, that precognition [read: being psychic about the future] exists.”

Schwartz will be speaking at the upcoming IRVA Conference (ref: Remote Viewing) in early May.

(Thanks guys for letting me post the pic!)

(This adding real-time stuff like photos is complicating my posting on past-dates, isn’t it! Well as long as I keep it straight enough that I don’t post a picture on a date prior to its being taken, I think I’m safe…)

Hey! I AM alive. Hard as it is to believe some days.

Right now I am working like 8am to 2am. It’s nuts. So I don’t have much time to write and it’s kind of hard to formulate ANY thought, let alone a decent blog post. But I will be back soon!

I have several major focuses in my life which tend to take up about 98% of my attention when they are present. At which point, everything else falls away. I go through these focuses one at a time. And when I am with focus X, everybody in focus Y and Z think, “What on earth happened to her?!” and my friends get irked at me and so on.

I guess the reality is that I am a chronically over-committed sort and I can only be with any program “cyclically”.

Alas, that seems to include an eating program. I’ve been ignoring Lowcarb for awhile now but AS OF MONDAY 9/3 I am back on a 12 week plan. I have a nifty spreadsheet for that as well as one for general tracking that I will link on my next post in case anybody else wants to use them.

I haven’t had any money for awhile (when I say that I am being quite literal) but I get paid tomorrow so can finally go shopping for REAL FOOD. Not the carbfest nightmare (Ramen is 6for$1) I’ve been eating while in temporary poverty. I know, some great bloggers have exampled how LC can be done on a budget (Regina at Weight of the Evidence) has more than one good post on that) but I don’t think I budget well enough to do it on twice that budget. It’s a good thing I have a job is all I can say.

Meanwhile back at the… er, mental world of PJ, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the stuff I blogged on some time ago regarding society bias against fat, and “fat activism” and things like that. It really moved me and made me feel quite differently about my lowcarb public stuff than I used to.

I eat lowcarb–not as often as I should–because for me, it is healthy, it tends to avoid gluten, it definitely avoids carbs, it increases my protein, and I like the food. I am much healthier when I’m eating lowcarb. I feel so sorry for people who, when they diet, are really doing nothing more than being miserable and underfed for awhile but otherwise see little benefit to it besides a slow wasting of muscle that reads on the scale as weight loss so they’re happy.

Totally aside from weighing some insane amount I am too frightened to step on the scale to rediscover, I would eat low carb because it’s good for me in so many ways. It isn’t really about weight loss. Yes, I *want* bodyfat loss — absolutely! But I want about a dozen other things just as much frankly, all of which matter too. Putting the focus on ‘weight loss’ first, is kind of misleading because it ought to be about bodyfat, not just pounds. Second, it’s kind of overbalanced because it ought to be about health, not just size. And third, it’s just incomplete, because LC is as good for me for other reasons as it is for gradual weight loss reasons.

So I think when I get some time (in a day or so–by end of this weekend latest I hope) to come back and blog properly (I have several taggings I must respond to!), I think I am going to take my weight off my blog. I’ll keep it on my journal on the forum so anybody can see it if they want, as I link to it with my screen name from here; it isn’t that it’s a secret.

Recently there was a big drama (actually I think it is quietly continuing) about an eating plan that is, off-paper and into the hands-on practice, basically a starvation diet. Well, I really want the focus on this blog to be “healthy lowcarb yummy stuff and life”, not, “the contest to lose scale-pounds by eating a certain way”, and partly that’s because this mentality about “eat this way to lose weight!” is really part of the same problem that drives people to starvation diets to begin with.

If the focus were on what is healthy for you, what makes you feel good and strong and mentally clear and physically able, then there would never be any confusion about why living on 400 calories a day might be ok. I say this as a person who regularly, if not forcibly on a lowcarb eating plan, lives on sometimes that many calories a day. That is why I’m hugely fat. I ought to be a walking testimony-of-terror to anorexic groups about what mucking up your metabolism in the most serious way can do to a person.

So I’m not saying I don’t understand. Eating is inconvenient and time consuming and in general a bother unless I have time and interest. If someone fed me, I’d eat all the time. When my laziness and busy-ness (I am over-”focused” as attention goes) has to compete with food, it often loses. So I am no saint on the food front. I’m just saying that the whole focus on butt-size compared to what goes in your mouth is really part of the problem to begin with, that causes people to starve themselves or live solely on cabbage or all kinds of other bizarre and stupid acts of hysteria to deal with fat. And meanwhile, it means that even the people who should most support the acceptance of ’size’ in our society, no matter what it is, are basically playing the same game as those against it, when the primary focus isn’t “Hey I’m healthy and happy and isn’t this eating plan great” but rather, “Here’s how much of that nasty ugly weight I’ve managed to lose.”

Maybe in reality we shouldn’t congratulate people for losing scale weight–but for improving their health, which is just as hard-won an effort for people who do this in ways like removing cream from their coffee, or getting off gluten-containing foods, or improving their vegetable intake, as for people who do it by “officially losing weight.”

My point is that the whole concept of an eating plan is life-wide. It shouldn’t really be about your butt. It should be about your health in 1001 ways, your longevity, your quality of life. Person X who is eating broccoli and roasted chicken but not losing weight if that’s the case, is working JUST AS HARD on improving his life as person Y who is eating pepperoni and frankenfoods but losing weight on the scale.

A focus on health would circumvent a lot of problems and put the lowcarb focus where it belongs. I believe this issue of putting the health goals first and weight issues second is the way it ought to be, and I plan to do that with my exercise blog as well. Which I forgot I even owned until recently. Damn, I am such a scatterbrain! Can I blame this on eating all those carbs?! :-)

I really have wanted to find a pair of 10lb dumbbells that were ordinary iron hex, so I could use my fractional weights — which are magnetic — to stick to the ends of them, in order to make them higher weight. And in a perfect world, I would find a pair of 12 lb and a pair of 15 lb, as well.

Walmart has nothing but neoprene coated dumbbells. I already have the coated style in 10#. The next size up they have is 20#. Which is a whole heck of a lot harder for me even to lift off the rack. I don’t know why it’s hard to find something between 10 and 20. It seems like most folks, especially women, would have to go through that weight range.

I went to the sporting goods store in my town, Hibbett Sports. Apparently they are some generic chain, because they tell me ‘the truck comes on Tuesdays’ and they have no idea what will be on the truck. It shows up, dumps stuff off, and they put it in the store. So despite my checking back regularly, for weeks I have not been able to find more than one (1) 10# hex iron dumbbell (not two; I need two!) let alone one in 12# or even 15#. They do have the 15# but only in the coated style. I suppose I should buy the single 10# and trust they will replace it and I can buy the second one.

I know my interest in plain iron makes me some kind of weight lifting luddite. But there’s no point in having magnetic fractional plates (meaning up to 2#, so it can be ‘added’ to a dumbbell) if you don’t have something they’ll stick to. Besides. I don’t care how stupid it is. Iron makes me feel cooler than cute little rubbery things.

There’s no point to buying weights online. The shipping costs more than the product.

But I live in the middle of nowhere. So my choices are limited.

***

My new workout schedule starts tomorrow, Monday. I feel so lazy when I’m not working out.

Yesterday was my high carb day. I do a VLCCKD 13:1 or Very Low Carb Cycling Ketogenic Diet in a 13 day VLCKD to 1 day HC ratio. I planned my food in advance and failed abysmally to eat any of it. I ended up sleeping in the day instead of the night before and woke up too late for my planned restaurant. So we had pizza. Which was a big mistake.

Or not. Actually I felt so miserable for hours, and am so bloated today (and will be asthmatic by tomorrow from the gluten) that I suspect I have cured myself of pizza. It might be my favorite food in the world, but how it makes me feel is not good. The only REAL bummer is that my measurements will be a little bigger tonight from the carb bloating; I forgot today is my measure-point. Oh well.

My weight isn’t moving, unless it’s going up and down. Most days it’s a miracle if I can make 1500 calories, with effort, yet I’ve managed to maintain this weight with no problem. Story of my life… I can keep this weight and even gain on something like 1/3 my alleged required calories per day, depending on what foods I’m eating. I’m hoping to up my protein to the appropriate level this coming week and from now on, which might cause some gain, but here’s hoping it contributes to muscle gain which is more important to me.

So I guess weight-wise, I’m feeling like I’m in the middle of nowhere too. Here’s hoping that just staying on VLC and keeping with working out, eventually shows some results that are not real obvious in the day to day of it.

I didn’t have much workout planned for last night after I got off work, and I went and rocked my abs slightly on the Bean and considered The Closet of my weights room. I’d wanted to assemble a new desk, but wasn’t sure I had all my tools, which are in the closet, hopefully, somewhere. The closet has been the catch-all for too many things over time, no matter that I tried to keep its scope limited. As opening the closet displayed, it looked more like something out of a comedy movie, where anybody smart would close the door immediately before 500 items came crashing out upon them.

A couple weeks ago, or especially prior, I would never have considered tackling this, or even beginning. When you don’t have the energy to make it more than 30% through any project, never mind its cleanup, you learn to just avoid projects altogether. Everything gets worse before it gets better of course, so that’d just leave you with having made things much worse. But last night I had the feeling that it was time to start on it. One area at a time; whatever I could do. My goal being to get through one region of the closet, and get everything cleaned up and my weights room returned to its normal clean spacious self, by the time the night was over.

Half a dozen big porcelain dolls of the kid went to live on her bed. Wrapping paper in the tubes, after I tried to store it in a variety of ways, got tossed in frustration. All gift bags and folded wrapping paper got condensed into a single big bag. Then I had an entire top shelf, one wall to the other, of binders and envelopes. I realized that these were put there in spring of 2000 when I moved here. Binders filled with stuff I created or collected for interests I had — guitar, songwriting, handwriting analysis, some other things. The envelopes held tons of stories I wrote around age 18-20 and typed laboriously on my little manual. Four yearbooks from the dark ages… and tons of photos.

I spent most the night putting photos in the many big binders I had for them, to organize them. I couldn’t have sat on the floor so long or done this previously, and it felt so novel that I was actually accomplishing something. But it was rather sad to look at the last ten years of photos, from my kids’ life, and hate every photo that had me in it. When I looked at photos of times when I wasn’t huge, I was happy to have them; it was a pleasant reminder. Everything else, I just grimaced and wish that I didn’t have to keep it at all, which I only do because my parents rightfully insist that someday my kid or grandkid might want to have pictures of me when I’m gone. Yearbooks from a teenagehood of utter misery. And pictures of my stepmother ‘doing things’ with my kid that I haven’t been able to. It ended up being a rather emotional night.

But that part got done. The closet still has a lot to be worked on, another night. I figure, this is one corner of the house, I will just gradually work my way through the house. If I work on something almost every night, it shouldn’t take more than a few months before I’m through even the garage (a nightmare of epic proportions).

My body still has that bizarre insistence on heavy sleep. I had nightmares last nights, as did my little girl (who got lucky with my good mood last night so was sleeping beside me), and we even frightened in bizarrely parallel ways in our dreams last night, as if the same elements played out in different ways for each. I’m probably just venting stored biochemical (repressed emotion). I haven’t been eating enough, as usual, but it’s not just preventing my losing weight; at this point I am 8 lbs. heavier than I was ten days ago. Go figure!

I’m trying not to get freaky about it but it’s kind of difficult. I’m surely not working out enough to gain significant muscle yet, and although I have a slight bloat it’s no more it seems than it was a week ago yet my weight is like 4 lbs higher than then. So I just have no idea what’s going on. I’m telling myself to not be hysterical and just keep on, don’t go off the eating plan (whatever plan it might be, at this point eating period is enough of an accomplishment), keep working out, and trust that things will get better somehow. I have a measure point this coming Sunday. I better have lost some kind of size or I’m definitely going to be upset!

And here it is. I now have 52 goals and a year to accomplish them. I’m convinced if I am focused and remind myself of them often that I can get a whole lot more done in my life than the alternative — the normal “life passing by” without attention!

In no order, so I can shuffle them without having to renumber later. :-)

Health and Fitness (6)

* shake off the burden of at least 100 more pounds of body fat.

* be able to walk three miles at a moderate pace without stopping.

* be able to ride 30 minutes on my exercise bike (any level, 80rpm) without stopping.

* be able to do my kneebend-holds for at least five minutes.

* have the muscle to do at least 8 squats without harming my knees.

* establish enough habit where eventually I can say I have exercised every day for two months.

Commitments to Others (7)

* SM’s birthday present from 9/06 is getting a little old. How bout sending it?

* K’s ebay to germany is like four months overdue. 6/19/07

* Send all the promised disks to S, given all the stuff she sends ME, sheesh. 6/19/07

* E’s shirataki noodles are aging in a box by the door. Send already!! 6/19/07

* clean up and sell printer-toner-etc. (worth 5K or so) for at least 1K, owe A half of the result

* C’s website is broken, the database interface area. Fix it.

* Either quit fully or finally do the new T site for C.

* get M’s project finished programming and ready to open

* transfer RW’s site to the PF 6/19/07

Medical (6)

* get the kid to the dentist for pre-braces consideration

* get the kid to doc and referral for minor surgery to remove skin tag

* get myself to dentist and get tooth fragments removed

House Stuff, minor (6)

* get pot rack hung up in kitchen

* replace hallway thermostat with one that has a display that actually works

* assemble slant-desk and put in room.

* add shelves to the walls in the kid’s room to deal with stuff.

* add high shelf on one kitchen wall, to store food books and vases

* get some kind of alarm for the big garage freezer so if power goes out I’ll know

Finance (2)

* Establish an actual budget, especially for food and kids’ clothes, and really good tracking system for all income.

* Come up with a payment plan for all debts, no matter how pathetic, including some saving, and stick to it.

Family (1)

* Work out a detailed chores list for kid and be a hardass about making her learn some responsibility and dependability.

House Stuff, major (10)

* patch bathtub, or put in a cover-tub, or…

* get a motor put in the giant attic fan, get it to work

* replace bathroom sink-cabinet with something that fits

* replace kitchen under-sink plumbing with something that works

* make a ramp up the cat window of the garage

* get drip irrigation set up for backyard garden

* paint my bedroom

* paint the living room

* paint the kitchen and finish painting and replace cabinets

* tear out carpet in weights room and clean and wax floor, whatever its nature

Organization and Parsing

–Hobbies, anomalies study (1)

* get boxes of CD/DVD media sorted, all the massive uploading to FTP done where needed, database software created and data entered, and then disks stored or given away so they are not in boxes sitting around.

–Hobbies, music (3)

* figure out how to make my musical keyboard work again.

* Find a decent place to store keyboard and other various instruments that have no place

* Move the three guitars, amp etc. into the exercise room or living room perhaps.

–Hobbies, sewing and crochet (2)

* use at least 50% of all material to sew something useful; get rid of at least 25% of the rest of it, so the storage is not so much stuff.

* get rid of all the lovely yarn I’m never doing anything with. Use one of the trunks to store the last of the material with.

–House, General (9)

* go through all the tubs of ’stuff to do something with’. Get rid of as much as possible. Put the rest AWAY already.

* go through all remaining books. Give all away that I can. Condense the rest into minimal storage space.

* make ceiling anchored hangers for various candle holder presents

* give away or sell huge 1200 air conditioner in garage

* give away or throw away stored Y2K food in 5g buckets stored in garage

* get ex to take his boxes, books, etc. out of here

* when finished painting (…) get rid of the ton of painting materials, paints, etc. in garage

* get rid of or move all the stuff on the 2 black shelves in living room

* get all new media onto media tower. Use TV center if more space is needed. If there isn’t enough space, consider getting rid of some of the VCR tapes.

…and last but should be first:

* Pray. EVERY DAY.

* New refrigerator

* New carpet

* Invisalign for me! (clear braces)

* Eventually, skin surgery, but that’s years down the road with low bodyfat%

Immediate 1-3 month goals:

* Get weight/squat cage put back together 6/17/07

* Come up with several pairs of sweats for outdoor exercise… make or buy

* Sell enough stuff… save enough money… whatever… to get the kid & me a small non-inflateable (we have cats!) pool for the summer

* Save money, deposit, pay for half, go on vacation Sep-Oct

* Fix exercise bike, if it has a problem

“If you want something to get done, give it to the busiest person.”
– business maxim

Have you ever noticed that when scheduled, more stuff seems to get accomplished? Do you ever have those times where you go through an hour, a day, a week or weekend, a month, and it seems like not a whole helluva lot actually got done in the end?

I’ve been thinking about a variety of motivational menus along these lines; there’s a whole smorgasbord of spiffy slogans and precise little plans that one could use to schedule their life as well as German trains.

I was looking around my house earlier. You’ve heard the saying, “the walls talked back,” perhaps. My walls probably would, but they are muffled and gagged by the amount of junk stuck in front of them, waiting for something to be done.

My house projects, life projects, health projects, kid projects, garage projects, and other “goals” are starting to stretch into the horizon of infinity.

And if I’m not making a ton of headway on them, perhaps it is because I am not really trying. I am not constantly reminded of them. I don’t have any actual schedule for them. They just become “wishes,” lost to the binary oblivion of blogging or the neurological randomization of daydreams and unfulfilled plans.

It’s time to expand my horizons, increase my recognition of my own potential, and explore the increased ‘attention’ value that reminder and planning for goals brings.

So to this end I am creating The Fabulous 52. Also known as, “52 accomplishments I will get off my ass and do within the next calendar year, because I rock and I deserve to do that for myself.”

These have to be possible — and reasonable — for happening within a year from now. Nothing that will take 2 years in any sane guess, or will require more money than 3 years of saving could come up with. They have to be things I control, e.g., I can’t count my kid’s hopeful weight loss in there no matter how much I want to help her, that’s her goal not mine. It can be anything from a construction project to a spiritual goal.

There are 52 weeks in a year. How much is it to ask that I “average” accomplishing one thing of importance a week? (It can vary of course, I might do none on the list for a few weeks, then cover a dozen in the next couple.) If the things I would put on my F-52 list are not worth having some priority, why are they on the list? It needs to be stuff I really do want to get done. I can add and remove things from the list over time.

The important thing is that I take the time to MAKE the list and to POST it somewhere, yes ON PAPER ’cause I’m a luddite, in my house, so I can SEE it. And to make a weekly habit of briefly reviewing it. 30 seconds a week to review. How hard is that? So the list takes time? — how much time do I spend on the internet? I have time to make a list of what is truly important to me.

So next up, soon as I get them worked out (or most of ‘em anyway), is my Fabulous 52 for the next year of my hopefully productive life!

This morning my kid as usual didn’t want to get up and hadn’t picked out her clothes as she’s supposed to and changed her mind twice and was late, late, nagging, reminding, stomping bellowing if you don’t get your butt out here right this minute young lady late, and I really just wanted to say forget it, who cares, school this week (its last week) is nothing but play anyway so why should it matter if you’re there, I’m so tired I just want to go back to bed.

But I acted like it was important to me because everyone knows the minute you become an adult you think school is a deeply valuable experience and punctuality is next to godliness.

I stopped by the store in the morning to get a couple bottles of Diet Mountain Dew. I really needed caffeine in a big way. I didn’t want to get out of the car and go in front of the morning pre-work rush at the local gas-station/store. I hate it when people see me. If I had my way I’d live in a freakin’ cave so I didn’t feel like every human who looked at me got that “oh-my-god-she’s-huge” look in their eyes.

But I went in and shopped and pretended I didn’t care.

o0o

Sometimes, I feel like I spend more time acting-like-something than a professional actor.

Granted, our culture puts us in a place where we must, sometimes; civilization is a thin veneer of let’s-pretend on top of the world of animals we basically are.

But between being massively overweight and being on a lowcarb eating plan, it seems like there are so many more options for pretending.

Recently on the lowcarber.org forum, there was a thread about whether people were “out of the closet” about being on a lowcarb eating plan. The majority of the people (so far) actually said that they didn’t openly say so, and plenty of them suggested a variety of subterfuge, convenient phrasings, and minor sins of omission, they say instead.

Why? Because they got tired of being harrassed, of getting spontaneous, if completely ignorant, over-opinionated dietary advice from everybody, because they didn’t feel like explaining it, because it was easier to just say X and let it be at that, etc. The person who started the thread said something like, “No wonder so many think lowcarb is dead, if most the people on it are in the closet about it!”

They’re just pretending. They’re eating salad and calling it not very hungry. They’re skipping the bread and dessert and calling it “cutting back on sugars and starches.” They’re claiming they’re allergic, they’re hypoglycemic, they’re diabetic, all kinds of things, just to get people to shut up and let it be already.

How much do we pretend? How much is necessary?

I pretend to have energy when I don’t, that’s a constant. Lowcarb helps with that by giving me a massive amount more than I ever have off it. Of course, it’s still not really enough to get someone my size bouncing off the walls, but it’s certainly more than usual.

Today is my official independence day: my husband, as of late last night, is out of the country, and permanently out of my life aside from visits-to-kid. Thanks be to God. I feel like I have lost a ton of weight from some unspecified part of my body, as if we hold some ‘astral’ sense of weight with things that ‘weigh us down’.

I could look at this as losing 195 lbs overnight. I feel great!

It’ll take me at least a month just to clean up the unbelievable amount of STUFF he over-occupied the main room (and largest bedroom) with, but I’ll do it. And after two months of ice and snow, and 8 cats stuck in the house all the time, I decided to get tough about them at the same time. He went to the airport and they got thrown out to live in the garage. It has a couple HAC vents out there, food, water, litterboxes, and a cat-door in the window so they are free to go in/outdoors. I let the little fragile one with no body fat stay inside, but when it warms up, she can go out too.

Already the house FEELS significantly different.

I’m so happy.

I sang, “Hit the ROAD, Jack! And don’tcha come back! No more, no more, no more, no more!” all the way home from the airport.

I think I’ll go clean something.

A new experience is making such a big difference for me:

Organization.

(Heh. I bet you thought this was about something else.)

I’ve had a real challenge while on low carb, especially the last 2 months, with a variety of factors, including:

How many of us work our butts off for someone else, but… only “hope to get around to” the things we want to do?

* remembering to eat
* remembering to weigh myself
* remembering to take my supplements at all, let alone 3x a day
* being able to drink water consistently through the day so that I can get a gallon in by the end of the day
* not eating frequently enough (rather than only once or twice a day, or meals separated by 6 hours)
* not preparing properly so when I go to eat, there is something lowcarb available that does not take me 30 minutes to pull together (if at all)

…All of which combines to other side effects, like not getting nearly enough protein each day, and more.

Yeah I know. After reading that you’re thinking, “You can’t remember to eat?! You have no brain!”

Yes, there is that…

But seriously, I wake up in the morning and I’m into the “get kid to school mode” and then I move on to the “I work from home mode” and that’s that. I’m used to putting the kid, the job, in fact everything, before “me” on my priority list.

I’m very focused. When I’m doing thing X, I am totally doing it. I’m busy, and I don’t remember to do stuff until usually late afternoon, when I realized I’ve blown it yet again — I didn’t eat frequently, I didn’t drink water, weigh myself, take supplements, get stuff ready that I needed, etc. 15+ years of eating one meal a day and tuning out the world while I obsessed on work is a hard habit to break.

How many people are unusually competent as mothers or church planners or business people but feel like they’re constantly a day late, a dollar short, and behind the 8-ball in their personal life?

So my friend was telling me, “Set your alarm!” and I said well then I’d have to reset it a zillion times a day. I heard myself say that and thought to myself, “My gosh, am I the laziest human alive?! You know, I think I might be!” Talk about making excuses. But it got me thinking about it.

I had prepared a ton of chili verde, in the fridge and the freezer, in those little Glad plastic 4oz (1/2 cup) containers. I had baked some Cocoa Muffincakes v1.8 which began a healthy muffin and turned into a sweet treat by the time I was done with it. So for the first time in awhile, I had actually prepared food in advance that I could eat as needed. Plus I have a variety of stuff right now that I could munch on if I chose.

So the day BEFORE today, I sat down, considering what I had in my fridge and pre-pared, and worked out what I should eat today that would bring my nutrition numbers to my ideal.

Why did I never think of doing this before? Planning my food in advance? As if I have to be so undisciplined that I require spontaneity for food or something, how silly — it’s not like I don’t know what I like. (Surely, until recently, humans were usually very carefully planning food in advance and/or eating whatever had to be eaten before it spoiled.)

I put the info in my spreadsheet that I use as a food journal, with set times. Every so many minutes or hours, I was due to do something, usually combined with eating. I would eat X, or Y; I would weigh myself; and I made a point that each time I needed to eat, I would grab my 1/2 gallon water bottle, drink 8 long gulps, and then go do whatever I was doing. After I finished eating I would try to drink 8-16 more gulps, which when you are eating meat is not that hard because it makes you thirsty.

I set my alarm. And when it went off I would instantly re-set it for the next time (90 minutes later), do my thing, and come back to work. It didn’t take hardly any time, contrary to my expectation that getting up so many times a day would be too time consuming.

The result is:

* Today was by far my most ideal nutrition counts in the four months I’ve been lowcarbing.
* I drank a full gallon of water today and never did I really feel like I was waterlogging myself, because it was very gradual and consistent.
* I had many separate eating times of very small amounts throughout the day. I never felt hungry, I never felt full. The more protein your weight requires you get in, the more you need multiple meals, since taking massive protein/fat in one meal isn’t really ideal.
* Since my food’s planned ahead I never reached the middle of a prep only to discover we are now out of something I need, or it has gone bad.
* I got far more movement in my day since I had to get up every 90 minutes.
* I went to the bathroom every 90 minutes (remember that gallon of water!) but it wasn’t like being ‘constantly interrupted’ for it, because I was already up doing my thing anyway, so it just became a routine.
* I actually felt like I was accomplishing something!

Now attach praying, stretching, weighing, taking vitamins, etc. to some of those ‘timed events’ and you have a very constructive day.

I knew it was going to be a successful day. How could it not be? I had a plan!

And importantly, it’s never much. It’s never like some gigantic effort, like making a big meal or doing an hour of exercise or drinking a whole quart of water or something else that’s a real pain no fun. Every 90 minutes, I drop what I’m doing and do what I should — and it usually doesn’t take longer than 5-10 minutes max. And by the end of the day, I find that I have accomplished a LOT — all in tiny little pieces.

o0o

Meanwhile, I actually made nearly 200g of protein today, a full gallon of water, at 20 carbs and 2200 calories — and everything I ate was fabulous. I wasn’t stressed or rushing. I wasn’t trying to do math in my head and guess about my food or ‘forage’ in a hurry for lunch. I got my prayers and stretching and other things taken care of. And from the beginning of my day, here’s the kicker:

I KNEW IT WAS GOING TO BE A SUCCESSFUL DAY.

How could it not be? I had a plan!
I had everything all worked out ahead of time.

It was easy, it was fast, and it got done.

Think about it. We plan our work days, our meetings, our lesson plans, our grocery lists. Those of us who do jobs like project management for a living, plan the ‘flow’ of things so there are no surprises (we hope), no panicking rush, no running out of resources, no bottleneck vs. desert of workflow for vendors and contractors, etc. We plan it, we document it, we report on it.

Funny most of us don’t put as much “Organization” into the rest of our lives, isn’t it? Why NOT pre-plan and schedule your food/water and minor activities? It’s not like you can’t change your mind if you need to. Isn’t LIFE at least as important as the job? Isn’t being competent and feeling good about what we accomplish in many areas just as important personally as professionally?

I’m used to putting the kid, the job, in fact everything, before “me” on my priority list.

Why not “get my act together” by sitting down and making a plan for shopping, for pre-cooking/storing, eating, and all the little things I must do? Why not set an alarm or organizer-reminder so that we get it all done regularly, unhurriedly, gradually — and perfectly?

Many years ago in Los Angeles as an independent contractor (troubleshooting, mfg. line process, software training, etc.) my business card said, “Organizing Your Organization.” Why not organize my own life? How many of us work our butts off for someone else, but then for ourselves, only “hope to get around to” the things we want to do?

How many people are unusually competent as mothers or church planners or business people but feel like they’re constantly a day late, a dollar short, and behind the 8-ball in their personal life? Maybe it’s because we aren’t used to making the same kind of effort on behalf of ourselves that we do for others.

The Big O is now underway. I’m making plans. I’m following plans. And it’s pretty amazing, frankly, how with a minimum of effort, I am accomplishing more than ever.

Year 2007 Resolutions

SECTION A: Me Me Me

A1. I resolve to stop for at least 15 seconds within the first 30 minutes of waking up each day, to concentrate on FEELING GRATEFUL FOR MY LIFE, and FEELING LOVED, and FEELING HOPE ABOUT MY FUTURE. And to say, “Please help me” to the Divine. 15 seconds. How hard is this?

A2. I resolve for one year, this year, to care more about myself than others. My first duty is to myself. When I am happy and cared for, I can be of better help to all — and a better, stronger example for my daughter. My motto is WWXD: What Would Xena Do?

A3. I resolve to bring regular exercise, at least 3 times per week to begin, into my life. This may have to begin with little more than counting how many seconds I can hold a half sit-up and things like that: that is fine. But it has to be something.

A4. I resolve to make a genuine effort to get at least 6 hours of sleep per night. If this means I don’t get as much done and see my best friend less, then that is what it means. My health, my weight loss, my attitude, my mental clarity, are paramount.

A5. I resolve, when affordable, to get my nails done regularly. Though the left hand must be super-short, keeping the right hand short to moderate length but strong will be great for guitar, and keeping them up and painted will be a small concession to luxury and taking care of myself.

A6. I resolve to do at least one archetype meditation per week that is specific to either weight/size-loss, health, or something else important in my life. It doesn’t have to take a long time. The impact of these on my reality is profound. There is no excuse for not taking 15 minutes for this.

That is all for the ME category.

I COME FIRST.

SECTION B: Kid Kid Kid

B1. I resolve as of February on to bring my entire house into lowcarb eating. I will supply fruits for snack, LC bread and LC tortillas, but otherwise the child will have to learn to eat lowcarb. There is no excuse as a mother for feeding her crap because it is faster/easier/she begs. She’s nearly fat. My responsibility as a mother is to her health, more than to my convenience.

B2. I resolve to get the kid to bed at a decent hour nightly and without bedtime carbs. She is chronically sleep deprived, often unsupervised during the night, and has learned disrespect for my efforts on this front. Aside from which it probably greatly affects her HGH output and metabolism. I will do what is needed because that is my duty as a loving mother.

B3. I resolve to make the kid do stuff with me. Allowing her to play video games or whatever instead of helping me cook, allowing her to do no chores but be messy, is just bad for her, and it diminishes time spent together and her sense of contribution to our mutual life.

That is all for the KID category.

BETTER PARENTING NOW.

SECTION C: Food Food Food

C1. I resolve to use a kitchen timer so that every 90 minutes from waking to sleeping, I am reminded to drink as much water as I can hold. At the most this should involve approximately 6 minutes per day. Six minutes to greatly improve my weight loss, my skin hydration, my health. I can do this. This means filtering water and filling water bottles at night or morning. YES, I can do this.

C2. I resolve to take at least two days per month to do some major LC cooking that can be stored in the freezer. Examples: chili verde, chicken stew, a big turkey, big meatballs, LC burritos. It can make the diff between LC turkey and pepperjack with fresh vegg quesadilla for me and kid vs….. junk or starving.

C3. I resolve to at least mention my food a minimum of 5 out of 7 days per week in my lowcarb journal. Inattention to my eating (and to eating at all) contributes to poorer upkeep of the matter.

C4. I resolve to arrange for my breakfast the night before, so it has pre-planning and is more likely to happen. This is the hardest meal of the day for me so far, but it hugely affects how hungry I am and the effort I will make to eat the rest of the day. Now that I know several foods I can prepare in bulk, there is no reason why I can’t arrange for something, even if it’s just a couple mini-muffins, a couple meatballs, whatever.

That is all for the FOOD category.

FOOD IS A TOOL: USE IT WISELY.

SECTION D: Others Others Others

D1. I resolve to make a list of the people I need to communicate with and to make a point to email or write them something at least every six weeks. I am falling out of touch with people who care about me and hurting their feelings. It does not take much effort! Just a little organization.

D2. I resolve to visit my grandmother for a couple hours at least once a month. She’s old, she lives 5 blocks away, there is just no excuse for not doing so. Ry must come. She can read a book if she’s bored but she needs to learn that this is a family responsibility. When I am old I hope someone visits ME.

That is all for the “others” category.

CHARITY STARTS AT HOME.

And that is my 2007 list of resolutions!

I AM QUEEN OF MY DESTINY! RULE WELL.

Here’s to a fabulous 2007!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

.

I’m a pseudo-programmer, so prior to Y2K, reading about the possibilities, I wondered if I should worry. I was just about to decide not to when the government and media both bizarrely clammed up to the degree that THAT was abnormal, which scared me worse than anything I could have read. (Government: “Don’t ask, don’t tell” apparently applies to several things that could use leadership as an alternative…)

Anyway, for about 18 months prior to the date, I studied. I mean I read more internet and books about how to do EVERYTHING than you can imagine, and than I can believe, looking back. I read so much I don’t even remember half of it and I normally have a good memory. But I know a lot more about everything from sanitation to childbirth, from injuries without medicine to how to build a sturdy wall from stones, how to bake without an oven if you have sun, a million things.

One of the things that really got me in my studies was that this idea most folks have, that our civilization is so immune from weather-related emergencies, is ridiculous. In fact, you’d be astounded by how many times huge numbers of people lose all power for quite a long time.

Reminds me of how in the ‘94 Northridge earthquake — which nearly killed me I might add — happened, just after, I was clinging to the wall of my back doorway. Everything had just stopped shaking, which nearly gave me sea legs adapting, I could hear the blood rushing through my head, and then the sky flashed vivid green and blue lightning like crazy! — and then abruptly the whole world went blacker than it ever, ever is in a city.

It was transformers blowing out… all over the place… and I was about 70 miles from Northridge. Parts of CANADA and Northern states lost power over that!!

Back when I lived in Seattle, I remember Spokane Washington was out of power for like 5 days, maybe more. People froze, it was the dead of Winter.

This article talks about how recent winds “up to 69 mph!” (the tornado alley Oklahoman in me scoffs, haha! We have straight-line winds here that get up to that.) caused a power outtage in Seattle, in other parts of Washington, even parts of Oregon.

I wish people understood that having food, water, basic medicine, etc. is not just for the paranoid but a sanity check worth having. Especially if you have kids. If your power went out in the middle of winter — stores closed, gas station closed, no just in time inventory, and mass competition from locals — would you be ok? When your house was just over the temperature outside that is solid ice, would you be ok? Do you have a tent your family could sleep in to conserve the heat around you? I know people who have a couple electric blankets and a thin pretty bedcover. If they lose power in winter they’ll wake up ice cubes. Will your neighbors be ok? Because they may need help and guess who they’ll ask. Do you have medicine if you need it?

I know, this isn’t lowcarb. The article just reminded me of all the reading I did prior to Y2K. Just like every house should have a fire alarm and a fire escape plan for everyone, every household should have some stored food and water, you can use it every so often after you’ve replaced it with newer stuff. It doesn’t take much effort to proactively make small plans just in case it’s ever needed.

When I was in 5th grade, we had the ‘fire training’. My classmate Linda’s house caught on fire just a few weeks later. She was the oldest of like 5 kids. Thanks to that training and the ‘fire plan’ she’d done for the assignment, she got her little siblings and led them out of the house to safety, crawling on the floor under all the smoke. The parents managed to get out their window or something, in a different direction. The house burned to the ground, not a shred of anything left. But they were all alive.

A little planning. That’s all it takes.

(This has been a community service. haha!)