Let The Games Begin:

Today was the day I was all set to download the documents I need for the first week of my classes, and all was well with the universe... until the Road Runner decided to up and quit on the only other working computer in the house (other than the phones, tee hee).
So I got to put life on hold *yet again* for another hour to mess with cables and wires and connections behind the dusty computer, but finally got it working (and clean!) again, wheeeee! It's great to be techno-savvy, but soooo perplexed as to why this process of starting school seems to be frought with monkey wrenches of all sorts (I must got me some bad Master's degree mojo goin' on, woo wooooooooo!).

So now, at the end of another busy day filled with more cupcakes (the co-workers weren't sated with the vanilla cupcakes and soon demanded chocolate... I'm too busy to get very creative, so I just made chocolate espresso cupcakes with whipped hazelnut ganache buttercream, no filling), visits from the grandbaby, loads of laundry, dinners planned, shopped for, house cleaned, organized, kid's lives in order for the school week, activities/transportation arranged, and now I *finally* have pages and pages of syllabi, assignments printed and highlighted, textbook chapters marked... all in anticipation of turning in my first assignments in a couple days (first 3 page paper due by Friday, gar!). Sigh!
And life is good... just wish me luck, k? Still need to get those &%$@# cupcakes frosted, and it's getting late:-(
p.s. exactly one hour later...
If my encounter with the vanilla cupcake last week was a wee little affair, what I've since done with the chocolate cupcake could only be classified as a full blown romance: I had no shame WHATSOEVER eating a whole one (covered in chocolate sprinkles, no less!) and even licked the beater with great, sinful delight after the last cupcake was frosted.
My rationale for the big cheat was that it was best to enjoy it while the gettin' was good: I was there, it was there, the moment was *perfect*-- the cake fresh, the frosting creamy and soft... I plan on absolving myself of my indiscretions tomorrow with a 2 hour session at the gym after work, but will no doubt be replaying the scene over and over in my head, hoping to relive it a little as it will be my last for a long time to come, tee hee.

A Boy and His Dog:

Maggie and Jacob's first pheasant; awesomely, fantastically cool, and 100 times better than sitting on the couch (even if it IS cold and windy outside, no?).

p.s. Click on the picture: doesn't Maggie look a little freaked out? And what's up with that boy's hair? Oy!

I wish I knew you...

This tune came on the Celtic Crush show early this morning and it got stuck in my head. Something about that note she hits when she sings "and we'll meet some daaaaaaaaaaaay" and the simple guitar riff she plays over and over that my brain got fixated on (which, after many hours of deep thought, I realized reminds me of this). Should pull out the violin and find out what note it is... my niece had her teeny tiny 1/4 size violin out last night and it was fun to try and knock out a few tunes on it, even downloaded a tuner onto my iPhone so I could make the little thing sound like it's supposed to (tough to tune a wee instrument like that, was hoping I wouldn't pop a string).

Much to my sadness, I able to access my classes today, even tho they don't officially start until Monday:
I found out yesterday that my laptop is, in fact, dead, as the new cord didn't bring it magically back to life as I had hoped....but-HEY! Called the folks at Compaq and was thrilled to discover that not only do they now employ tech support people that speak an understandable form of English, but that my sad little laptop has *30* days left on it's warranty (vs 30 days out as I had feared)! Woo hoo! There is a slight suckage factor that I'll have to start classes using the kid's computer (with the wonky keyboard), but hope it's only temporary. Oh, and that it doesn't look like going back to school will be much fun, lol... one of my instructors is located in Saudi Arabia, which I don't hardly even understand, but ya gotta love technology nonetheless... here's to hoping the guy speaks English.

Fascinating discussion here: This is my favorite blogger in all of Blogland, always good for thoughtful discourse. But I must warn you: if you get lost in the comboxes, you'll quickly become mired in despair at how soulless we've become as a society and how far we've fallen... but the good news is that as long as there are people like Rod around, there's still hope for us (and not of the creepy, political variety). Major snaps to Rod for reminding me each day that all is not lost.

Obama vs McCain Dance Off...

http://view.break.com/592648 - Watch more free videos

Tap that ass? Bwahahaaaahaha!
More people have told me that I look like Sarah Palin in the past week (cause I've had a lot of older, vision impaired patients at work lately perhaps?).
Politics at it's finest...

Say Hey!

Heard this song on the way home today, and instantly, I really liked it... has a nice island feel to it,which I'm sorely craving as the weather turns colder and colder each day. And the performer doesn't look like the type of guy who would run the streets singing "I love you, I love you, I love you", does he? Makes the song even more fun.

"Seems like every where I go, the more I see the less I know"; so, so true.

So Far Away...

from my brain, that is...

Maybe I shouldn't have gotten the flu vaccine while I'm still feeling rotten... dang that hospital peer pressure! They have a list up on the wall at work with the names of the people who have/have not gotten the vaccine so it's apparent TO ALL if you've been a wussy bad girl and therefore open to all forms of nagging. If I was the hypochondriac type I'd say I could feel the viruses hooking up and mutating in my brain, creating the fog I've felt all afternoon, sleeeeeeeeeeeeeepppppyyyyy!

But being the fully rational and unimaginative girlie that I am, I'd prefer to think it's just 'cause I had quite the whirlwind of a weekend; entertaining visitors, running amuck, preparing for a busy week-- not to mention recovering almost 20 patients yesterday all by my lonesome. Fortunately, the work dried up early in the afternoon today so I was able to get home a little sooner and rest my weary head to ready myself to do it all over again, and again, and again. In the big picture it's all good, I'm so grateful to have a decent job in these goofy times, but I REALLY wanted to extend my week of leisure just a few days longer, waaaaaahhhhhhhh!

Also, my laptop died a few minutes ago, and am hoping a new cord will bring it back to life before my class begins next week; really, it's my own fault at this point, since the dog chewed up the cord months and months ago and I should have replaced it then. Jake did such a nice job of MacGyver-ing it back together that I took it off the "to do" list, I'm just glad it croaked now vs. in the middle of a 20 page paper... yippie yahooey, and thank God for Ebay ('cause I got one for $17 postage paid vs some $80 at Best buy, and this girl doesn't want to go there anyhow).

Addendum: I have a confession to make...

After many painful and wonderful moments of loyalty, discipline, and devotion, I'm ashamed to admit that I cheated.

And who ever would have thought? I was never the kind of girl who lacked in self control, never one to cave in to temptation, even when something lovely was right in front of me, enticing me...

But I did it... and in the grand scheme of things, in spite of the risks, it was quite nice, *completely* worth it :-)

I can't say that I'm looking forward to getting myself in that situation again, but if another vanilla cupcake brushed with lemon juice, filled with raspberry jam and topped with a mountain of lemon meringue frosting comes my way, I'll be better prepared (damn my good baking skills, and my nice coworkers for being cupcake worthy! Who ever could guess that I couldn't bake a few dozen and never eat one... it took a couple days, but I finally caved, sigh!)
My next object d' affaire:

OOOoooooooOOOOOooooooOoooo! So dirty, yet soooo delicious;-)

p.s. Was it cheating if I thought of a salad while I was eating it? What if I ate it in the bathroom so no one could see??

Yay!

It's amazing how many people are on the roads at 6:30, at how dark it already is at this time when at the beginning of the week it was still light...
Getting up early to get the girl to the bus isn't my ideal early morning scenario, but so far it hasn't been bad. There's a dreamy quality to jumping out of bed the instant the alarm goes off vs laying in bed for 1/2 hour and waking verrrrryy sloooooowwllly:
For the first 5 minutes of so after you roust yourself, it's almost as if you're still dreaming, carrying the remnants of your last dream in your head as you rush to get ready, trying to make sense of who you are and where you are.
And it's GORGEOUS outside at this time of day; also dreamlike, misty, like the narrow and soft space between sleep and awake. Plus, it's wonderful then to have 20 minutes all to myself before the boy gets up and round 2 starts.
Speaing of wonderful, have I mentioned how fan-freaking-tastic it has been to have most of this week off? I am still a little sick (sinus infection?), but feel rested, better, more like myself. I couldn't have this amount of time to myself all the time, and it rots to get to the point where I need a break so badly, but it's another one of those push-pull situations in life where suffering thru the difficult things makes the wonderful things that come after so much more appreciated. So, YAY! And back I go next week to the grind: 44 hours, bummer:-( Hope I make it to the gym after work for a little sanity time...
Speaking of the gym (sorry, segueways don't come easily at 6:30 in the am..), I received the *best* compliment I've probably gotten in quite a while:
My spin instructor got off her bike 1/2 way thru class yesterday to check and see where our gears were, how hard we were working. With my cold, I've vacillated this week between working reallllly hard to knock the goo out of my head, and being pretty wiped out, yet still cranking it--but you still wonder where you stand in relation to the other people who have been taking the class a lot longer than I have.
When she came by my bike she said "wow, you're really working hard", and then pulled me aside after class to comment on what a strong rider I was, on my level of athleticism. And while I know my body has changed a great deal after a summer of heavy riding and daily spin classes, I have no idea if my change from an overweight, out of shape person to an avid cyclist (20# lighter, wheeeee!) is apparent to anyone else. Or if the new muscles, no longer covered by a layer of chub and lots of clothes to hide them, can be seen vs only felt (my glutes feel *really strange*, maybe it's from doing a few too many of these:

Time to get dressed and enjoy my last day of freedom, to one last morning at the gym for a while...
LATER: went shopping today, since my belt has become a fashion necessity again, and lo and behold, I'm down another pants size (the smallest I've been since the kids were born, yee-ha!)... LASK eye surgery scheduled for two weeks from today, too, but not sure how I feel about that; we're such pragmatists that something unnecessary like cosmetic eye surgery is hard to do without much guilt.

Be Ok:

This is the theme song of the day, serendipitously chosen by the local High School radio station (WBSD 89.1, best radio station *anywhere*) as it was the song that woke me from a deep sleep this morning:
(I couldn't have picked a better one if I tried)



This was the day where I was going to try and get my equilibrium back after the events of the past few days: getting sick, cars breaking down, children's secrets revealed... and as such, I've had to expend a great deal of energy to fix/arrange/organize things with only half the brain capacity and a full box of tissues at my side. Add to that the lovely weather that fairly screams "get outside and get stuff done!", and I'm so sooooo glad to have this day off to recoup and get my head straight.

Gracy pants' behavior and broken car earned her a month and a half of bus rides, starting this morning: wheeeee! It was a pain to get up at 6 to drive her maniacally do the bus stop, but I made sure she had something to eat, a little spot of coffee, and a jacket (yes, she's 16; tell me about it... but even naughty girls need some mommy time), so when I got her on the bus knowing she was going to make it to school on time for a change, a wonderful peace descended upon me. Getting home and having all that quiet time all to my ownself was very nice, too.
To put it in perspective:
I was in such a panic yesterday before I got the bus set up, wondering how I was going to drive the girl to school every morning at 7, run home, get Jacob ready, myself in order, Jacob dropped off at 7:50, and myself to work all before 8 am. Really, it was quite the dilemma, made my head spin. I've done it a couple times before, and it's no way to start the day, esp when work is soooo hairy right now.
But I have to tell you, getting Grace on the bus, having some time to myself, getting Jacob organized and fed, off to school, and my sickly self to the gym with nary a hitch this morning was bee-you-ti-ful, and for a brief moment as the autumn sun shone its warmth upon me this morning I truly felt at peace with the world, and it was GOOD:-)

Gardening tidbit (there weren't that many this year were there? Poor gardens have been neglected..):
In my boogery, sudafed induced haze I mustered up enough energy on Sunday to cut down the seed heads from all the perennial gardens on the property and wheel them up to the prairie (a necessary evil if you don't want to expand the gardens each year, takes at least a couple hours). How I pulled that off, I'll never know... drugs-- powerful stuff, I tell ya!
I used to really enjoy that task, too (somewhat... it's dirty and scratchy and hot), loved breaking apart the 80 gagillion seedheads one by one and distributing the seeds throughout the prairie in all the promising spots; I'd take a look and see where some rudebeckias might look good or where some echinaceas needed to go, like some benevolent God of my own little domain. But Sunday, I just dumped the plants in big piles and wandered back, glad to have it over so I could crawl back on the couch:-(
Feeling much better today, I tore out the huge tangles of morning glory that climb on the deck railing, chicken coop, and everywhere else it wasn't supposed to go.. they look so pretty and romantic when in full bloom, but after a frost look desolate, and are so covered in seeds that they need to be taken somewhere else. These insanely vigorous plants and their spawn are from plants we grew from seed at our old house 6+ years ago, crazy! They obviously love it here...
I threw the plants up by the fence in the front prairie, wonder how long it'll take before they take over up there, too?

For some reason, I lost all interest in the gardens this year, but hope taking a season off will get me yearning to dig new gardens and get my hands dirty next year... we'll see.
In the meantime, I'm just going to try and be ok:-)

Oy!

Did ya ever have one of those days where you felt like you could never focus on any one thing long enough to get anything done?
Believe it or not, I got all the crap stuff on my daily list accomplished (laundry, phone calls-- all the big items) but the *little* things like "remember to grab your vitamins so you can take them before you go into the other room" sort of stuff, the kinds of things that keep you from wandering aimlessly from one room to the next, over and over and over again in fruitless pursuit of what you were going to do... *that's* the stuff I've been having a problem with today.
And now my brain hurts now with all the futile remembering and forgetting and re-remembering; think it's time to grab a glass of wine and call it a day;-)

Sick:

So totally bummed, cause I'm siiiiiiiiick! My head is aching, nose running, froat sore, and worst of all, no energy to pretend like I'm fine (which is what I usually do).
This always seems to happen after a long stretch of working too much, as I have been the last 3 weeks: with all the changes at work, the stress of anxious co workers, uncertainty about my job (who knows what my job even *is* these days-- things are 360 degrees different over the past two weeks since they've restructured everything... used to have at most 9 patients to recover in the morning, which made for a mondo-schitzo morning, but now we are recovering 13+ patients in the same time span, with no breaks, no help--crap! You head into work and wait for someone to tell you how things are different today since yesterday, and hope that it all comes together and no one has a meltdown, wheeeee), it's made for a hairy past few days, and my body is crying "uncle"!
So very glad to have nearly a week off now to recover, before it all starts back up again and I pile on the stress of starting school in a couple weeks. Hopefully, when I am back to the crazy hours they will have it all figured out and I can become acquainted with whatever it is they want me to do and I can return to my happy autopilot that motors me numbly through each day.

Ya know, what truly rots is not the sickly part, but the fact that it is GORGEOUS outside, and so feel double the weight of getting off the couch so I can fully appreciate this fleeting weather; feel pressured to do something "fallish" like take Jacob to the pumpkin farm (he hates it anyway), or to a corn maze (ditto that), or really just anything other than being bundled up and shivering and wasting the lovely sunshine away.... gar! I would love a nap, if only to ease my headache, but feel too GUILTY about closing my eyes and missing a moment of this nice day... would love a tylenol, too, but can't seem to get off the couch:-(
(and in the meantime, Maggie keeps sneaking over and stealing my booger-y kleenexes off my pile; hope she eats them in their entirety so I don't have to pick them all up later when I finally muster the energy to get moving).

So here lays I, trapped between being unable to move and feeling too guilty to fully embrace any attempts at recuperation.... lame. We have Jake-events to attend this afternoon as well, boo. If I go, I'll be blowing my nose constantly, feeling tired, freezing, not at all in good form to socialize with strangers; but these events are *so* few and far between that I need to make an attempt: Need to eat something, need to wake up, need to get some tylenol.
Need to lay on the couch, need to close my eyes, need to nap away the afternoon... yeah.
(Also need to figure out how to get Grace to school all next week and then pay for her $$ car repairs, but that's a whole 'nother story...)

Endorphin Block...

Ok, first it was blogger's block, which all by itself was fairly sucky...

But now I've extended the suckage to include an inability to kick my ass at the gym:-(

I did a 30 minute sculpting class on Monday that hurt me bad for a couple days, but since then I haven't been able to reach the level of intensity in my spin class that I've really grown to crave (allright, it's more like an endorphin high that I've become addicted to, seriously).

I used to sweat so much during spin that it would drip on the floor under me and soak my clothes (gross, I know-- and at first it really creeped me out). Then after a couple weeks the perspiration dropped off a bit, but it was still enough to get in my eyes and fog up my glasses. But NOW, even tho I've been cranking up the resistance to crazy high levels (19 today) and spinning my pedals as fast as I can, I can barely break a sweat, barely get winded... in fact, instead of collapsing yesterday after my spin fix like I usually do, I still had so much pent up energy that I did a sculpting class AND Zumba afterwards, and could have probably done one more class if I wasn't overdue for a meal and a little dizzy. Gar! I felt so dissatisfied.

Is it all that common to max out so soon in fitness classes? Or have I just hit a strange plateau, where all my muscles have grown accustomed to their daily abuses and are like "yawn, bitch. Is that all ya got?"

Granted, I am on cold medicine cause I can hardly breathe as I have something nasty a brewin...

Is sudafed like some sort of exercise meth? And if I keep taking it before class, will I end up looking all haggard like those people in the "after" photos you see on the Oprah show??

Cyndi before spin class:

Cyndi *after* spin class:

Sheeeoooooot! Maybe it's time to cease with all the exercising for a bit and chill out on the couch with a tasty box o donut holes.... for my health, after all. I mean, I already feel like an endorphin withdrawing crack whore who can't score her next fix, no matter how many tricks she turns; don't want to find myself on an intervention episode of the Tyra Banks show, dressed in spandex... (at least not until I lose those last 10 #, tee hee).

Kabir:

I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty:
You do not yet see that the Real is in your own home,
and you wander from forest to forest listlessly...
Here is the truth!
Go where you will,
to Benares or to Mathura;
If you do not find God in your your own soul,
the world will be meaningless to you.

I used to like that poem, ages and ages ago... and every so often it pops back into my brain for one random reason or another--in fact, it woke me up this morning at 5:30 and I haven't been able to sleep since, go figure.
Personally, I think God took an extended vacation from my soul and thus have been moving about in a haze ever since... and unfortunately, even tho church and its accoutrements are a nice filler material, they haven't had the staying power to keep me from wandering the forest all these years...
And altho I enjoy the travails of wandering, find neither purpose nor direction lately and would like to focus my efforts, find a guidemap so I can make sense of where I am, where I've been, and where I'm headed.

Dreamed of my hometown last night, of no one event in particular... just of the feeling I get sometimes when I'm there, when I was there, and woke up with Kabir in my head.
Strange.

Another spin class song; usually I'm not one to form a connection to a song right away, but when you have the resistance cranked up to 17, your legs are on fire and you can barely breathe... closing your eyes and focusing on the beat, the voice, and the lyrics can really pull you through:

I See You Baby...

Ok, for about 32 seconds I thought I would be able to pull off a wee little bit of a writer's strike, but even tho I am in a dry spell, blog-wise, it's far too difficult to NOT blog than it is to dry blog, so bear with me:


Not completely sure if this is meant to titillate those of my gender or not... but with my newly established identity as a gym dweller, made me laugh just a little...
Here's the original, if you wish to draw some parallels:

Being able to identify which one is your favorite will be very telling...

Me, I would love to get in on the girlie "stripper aerobics" class-- reminds me of my favorite pre adolescent television program "The 20 Minute Workout", woo hoo, in which I discovered that it was waaaaay fun to abuse my body to a perky, choreographed beat (and who knew you could find episodes of the show on line? I've been watching a few and it really explains a lot...)

I have many more things of a highly profound nature to relate, but it's all stuck in there and doesn't want to come out, boo. Maybe I need to let it fester for a few days until it's ready to explode... we'll see. In the meantime, I'm feeling achy and cranky and a bit blue today; clearly blog constipation has created a toxic overload to my brain and body.

Just for funs, I'm going to include this video:

This is the sort of stuff I pump into my head before starting work, trying to set the tone for the work day. The version I have stored on my iPod is a little more... nas-tay ("'cause you gots to be nasssss-tay!"), but I like the Fat Boy Slim nuances they added in this one. Since I'm leaving soon to see an 8pm Ani Difranco concert farfar away today, lord only knows what's going to get me revved up for work tomorrow morning-- double espresso with added espresso powder, with a side of amphetamine, perhaps?

p.s. even tho I hate to be cold this time of year, I just can't muster up the gumption to wear warmer clothes. Wearing jeans makes me feel like I'm suffocating in yards and yards of fabric; had a sweater on for a brief few moments yesterday and felt like I couldn't *breathe*. My clothes don't fit so great these days, and the low rise jean issue doesn't help: I'm yearning for a pair of fully fledged mom jeans that will cinch my waist so the pants will STAY UP. Hate the sensation that I'm only a bend at the waist away from some ass crackage, hate always having to crank the pants up, yank the pants up, pull the damn pants up all day all day all day...

Allright, wanted to change my original morose video to a more fun one, and discovered that there are NO Prince videos to be scrounged off YouTube.. guess Mr Prince doesn't allow such pilfering, ohwell:-( Seriously tho, they played a Prince song in spin class this am and I realized at that moment that I MUST get the "Purple Rain" soundtrack in it's entirety.... what a nerd!

p.s.s. the Ani DiFranco concert was very nice; she had a great xylophone player with her that really mellowed out her set... I could have 100% done without the political rhetoric, but what do you expect when you go to the most liberal town in a 500 mile radius to see the most liberal performer probably in existence-- and during an election year, to boot? I was just askin' for it, so I will limit my complaining, but it was painful and irritating and I will surely know better for next time;-)

Ya Know...

If you leave comments, I might be inspired to blog a little more.
You can even do it anonymously, and I will only delete them if they're ungodly vulgar (or not, who knows, tee hee)..