A Recommit and FMM

Now that I'm pretty sure the reading list of this blog has been reduced to no one, it seems like a great time to start blogging again. That's how this whole thing works, right? Blog. Stop blogging. Start again when no one cares? No? Well, I've been going about this all wrong then.

I haven't been blogging because there's been nothing to tell. After injuring myself in November, I fell off the wagon (and the bump from the fall really didn't help with the whole back injury thing - *snort* I love bad puns) and while I kept telling myself to get back on it, it was so hard. The wagon was so tall. I had to, like, climb up on to it and shit. (If you read that in a really whiny voice... yeah, that's what I sound like about this whole thing.)

Then I returned to full time work. And then I had a couple of other time commitments. And then my dance class moved to a location I couldn't get to. And. And. And. And I rock at coming up with excuses. Seriously, school kids should hire me to create their "I wasn't in class today because..." notes. Instead of excuses, I needed a goal. Something simple. Something I know I can do. Something fun.

Like a 10K.

I missed the TC 10K in Victoria because [insert any previous excuse here]. Also, I don't really like doing the 10K: it's insanely crowded and I find myself wanting to punch people in the back of the head because slow moving people crowd into corrals well above their projected finish time. I needed a new 10K to do.

I have tentative plans to visit my family in Alberta this summer so I searched my preferred travel dates and found a 10K in Taber, AB. It's apparently part of the Taber Cornfest. While the Taber Cornfest website still shows 2011 information, a 2012 race is posted on a couple of Canadian running websites. so hopefully it's a go for this year.

If it's not a go, I'll plan my own 10K route through the cornfields of Southern Alberta and make my family stand on the side of the road and cheer me in at the end. Preferably while they wave homemade signs of encouragement. Right now they're reading this and thinking "Andrea's such a clown". We'll see who's laughing when I hand you my home made ticker tape I want to run through!

Training officially begins next Monday.

EEK!

What better way to jump back into blogging than with a Friend Makin' Monday?

Simplified guidelines: Answer questions, post and link up here, sit back and watch the accolades pour in. Or something like that.

FMM: Three Things

1. Three of your favorite movies:
-Casablanca
-Beauty and the Beast
-Monty Python's Life of Brian (super excited because the Victoria Film Festival is having a MPLOB Quote-Along in two weeks *squee*)

2. Three of your favorite things to drink:
-Tea
-Coffee
-Beer (really can't get much more specific than that, I just like beer)
(I know, I know, water should be on this list and I do actually enjoy drinking straight water but it's not a 'favourite')

3. Three of your favorite songs:
Just three? Ugh, this pains me.
-Who Knows How to Make Love Stay - Doug and the Slugs (oh, 80's Canadian pop, how I love you!)
-Rolling in the Deep - Adele (I will listen to anything this girl puts out)
-Maple Leaf Rag  - Scott Joplin
A friend once described my taste in music as 'a menagerie of sounds'. Yup, that pretty much sums it up.

4. Three people who have recently been a positive influence on your life (outside of your family):
-K from work: really pushed me to go after a new job opportunity and then helped guide me through the process. It worked. I've got a new (and awesome) job.
-T and 106 (friends): convinced me that regular board game nights are cool (and they totally are!)
-Walter Lewin: read For the Love of Physics and it really opened my eyes to the beauty of physics of the every day world. I find myself trying to recall the equation for wind velocity when I see breeze through the trees nowadays. My goodness, I sound like a giant nerd.

5. Three things you to do keep yourself entertained:
-Read
-Sing and dance in the privacy of my apartment/listen to music in general
-Watch TV/movies

6. Three things you’re attracted to in the opposite sex:
-Eyes and smile (I'm lumping these together because one of my favourite things about eyes are laugh lines and you only get those if you smile a lot. The frequency of the smiling is more important than the actual smile.)
-Someone who is kind
-Nice ass (Hey, I'm just being honest)

7. Three things you love about yourself:
-My sense of humour
-My smile
-My nerdy personality (it took me a while to own up to my true level of nerd and now that I have, I like who I am better as a person)

8. The last three people who text messaged you:
-106
-THR
-Trish

9. Three things you’re looking forward to this week:
-Baby shower for THR
-Drinks with the alumni band crew
-Talk on human rights I've helped organise

10. Three wishes specifically for yourself…What are they? (Be selfish, and be honest.)
-I wish I could snap my fingers and be the active, fit person I once was
-I wish I was independently wealthy so I could set off on a round-the-world trip tomorrow (in the active, fit body I used to have)
-I wish I had a maid

11. Three of your favorite quotes:
"Humuor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world." ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Who, being loved, is poor?" ~Oscar Wilde
"Oh, don't pay life the compliment to take it seriously." ~Robert Service (from his poem, Laughter)

12. Three of your biggest fears:
-Falling and breaking a bone (I've never done it and the thought of it terrifies me)
-Sharp items like axes, chainsaws or swords make me nervous. Surprising for most people as I own two swords and have used axes and chainsaws many times in my life.
-Moving scarecrows on TV
 
13. Three of your favorite TV shows:
At this moment:
-The Wire
-Game of Thrones
-New Tricks

14. Three of your favorite things to purchase when you’re shopping.
-Books.
-Books.
-Books (I don't actually like shopping. It's simply a necessary activity so the only time I really enjoy it is when I'm turned loose in a bookstore.)

15. Three things that you enjoyed last week:
-Board game and Pub night with T and 106
-Tea and a game of rummy with C
-It becoming official that I got the new job

16. Three things that you always have in your bag or close to you if you’re not a purse kind of person.
-Lipgloss
-Wallet
-Pen and notebook

17. Three types of food that you wouldn’t want to give up.
-Pretty much anything my mom cooks (save her occasional decision to cook liver and onions when I was growing up. She can keep that to herself)
-Pad Thai
-Cheese Fondue

18. Three things you do to enjoy burning calories:
-Walking/Hiking
-Running (when I was doing it regularly)
-West African Dance

19. Three things you dislike about blogging:
-I love my family but sometimes I wish I hadn't told them I blog because I censor myself more knowing that my mom will read any curse words I put on here.
-Glaring grammatical errors or spelling mistakes that I notice after I hit publish.
-It's not blogging specific, but my current laptop is a pain in the ass. It's old and slowing down which means that a simple post takes way too long to write. Trying to include photos is almost painful. I've found myself saying "fuck it" and just tossing half-finished posts because my laptop is making me want to punch it.

20. Three ways blogging has changed your life:
-I've met some really awesome people
-I always wanted to keep a diary but was kind of crap at it unless I was travelling (I am the travel diary queen!) but blogging fills that need
-I plan more because I need to for the blog

Observations

I’ve been waking up with the sniffles since Monday morning. A quick shower and a cup of coffee and the sniffles are usually gone but when I woke up Wednesday morning, the sniffles were there as well as a dull ache in my left ear. Along with the dull ache was a dulled ability to hear from that ear. I was supposed to go for a run at 9:00 but the idea of jostling my head around really didn’t appeal to me. I texted my running partner and we turned our run into a walk up and down a large hill instead.

I was proud of myself. Once upon a time, I would have just cancelled any sort of activity if I feel like I did that morning. But I didn’t. I changed what I was doing but I still got out there and worked hard enough that I was satisfied with my effort. I was also very happy that my ear cleared up by noon. One of my biggest rational fears is hearing loss. I will take losing my sight over losing my hearing any day of the week and twice on Sunday.*

I’ve been trying to take the stairs as often as possible in my apartment because four flights of stairs adds up, but sometimes you just don’t want to. Like last Tuesday. I took the elevator and ended up flirting my way up the four flights with an attractive young man. For the record, flirting with hot men is good motivation for getting in shape. Okay, so it wasn’t so much that he was hot but that he was observant enough to know that I must have had a stressful day at work.

(“Is it really that obvious?”

“Yes. You look like the day beat you down.”

Well, he was right. My unit is undergoing a re-org which means desk moves to a less than ideal location and leaving behind some wonderful friends, so Tuesday was a wee bit stressful. I would like to point out, however, that he told a complete stranger that they looked tired. Tact is obviously not his strong suit.)

I want to put his observation skills to the test and see if he can notice a change in my figure next time we meet (as we seem to ride the elevator together every few months). Also, he seems like a hockey guy and now that I don’t have cable or the Internet, a hockey guy just down the hallway who works roughly the same hours I do would be really convenient.

Just putting that out there, universe.

And did I mention that he’s easy on the eyes?**

*My biggest irrational fear is that a scarecrow is going to come through my TV screen and sing to me. Don’t laugh! I know it sounds silly. That’s why I called it irrational.***

**Plus he’s in construction which is a bit of a *rawr* factor for me. He can build and fix things! How attractive is that?

***I’m not making this up. There is a certain Doctor Who two-parter which I have to watch with all the lights on and my teddy bear held strategically in front of my face.

I'm cheap and I hate moobies, but I've got new shoes!

It is Tuesday, April 6th as I write this, but I honestly don’t know when it will actually get posted. I’ve being having problems with the internet connection all day. It taunts me with five minutes of connectivity and then it crashes. Part of the problem is that I ‘permanently borrow’ an internet connection from someone in my building. Well, I call it ‘permanently borrowing’ but I believe the internet providers would call it ‘stealing’. Potato, pota... oh, that doesn’t really work when you type it out. For the most part, this hasn’t really been an issue: I use very little bandwidth when I’m online and I don’t download anything which would be noticed by someone else. But then there’s a day like this when there’s obviously a problem and the actual registered user of the modem is most likely out. I can’t very well call up Shaw and tell them I think there’s a problem in one of the apartments. That’s a phone call that can only end badly.

It’s not that I’m against paying for the internet, it’s more of the fact that I’m cheap. Why pay when I can get it for free? I blame it on my Scottish half. Here’s how ingrained it is into the Scottish psyche to be cheap: I was adopted at birth and raised in an Irish family; I never knew anything about my birth parents until a little over a year ago when I finally decided to request my live birth certificate (which includes the information of your biological parents); I was 28 years old when I found out that my biological father was Scottish (my biological mother was Irish) and yet I’ve been using the term ‘permanently borrow’ since I was a teenager. I didn’t even know I was ½ Scottish and I was still cheap!

It was a busy weekend for me. On top of parent's returning from overseas, and a night out with my stepmom and baby brother, and family functions for Easter, I turned thirty this past weekend. Thirty!! Despite being one of those birthday's that women everywhere are supposed to dread, I'm really happy to be thirty. I can't quite explain it but there's some sense of accomplishment at having reached this age. I've done it; I've arrived. Screw you, twenty-somethings with your over-done face make-up, perfectly styled hair, and skirts with less material than my bra, I'm thirty, and proud, and I'm going to wear my sweatpants to the grocery store, dammit! The only downside to getting older (so far) is the realisation that I can't wear high heels when my calf is sore and then go for a run the next morning. It was very, very painful. As a friend commented "Welcome to your thirties; start buying ointment."

For my birthday, I treated myself to some new running shoes: the Asics Gel-Fortitude 3 (right). It's pretty much love... until I get another new pair in a few months. I went to FrontRunners and went through the whole rigamarol of getting fitted. It has been at least three years since I last did and after the fiasco of my last purchase, I figured a fresh start with shoes was in order. The guy helping me was very thorough and knowledgable, and I was feeling pretty happy that I had a smart and very attractive sales rep until I realised two things: 1) he's married, 2) he has fairly sizable moobies for someone who's so fit. I am well aware that the second point is really shallow but moobies freak me out, like, moving-scarecrow freak me out. Still, I pushed past my own personal issues, avoided both eye contact and chest region for the remainder of my time there, and after trying five different pairs, I came back to the Asics. I'm scared to run in them because they're so shiny and clean. I don't want to ruin that.

My next purchase will be hiking boots so I can make sure they're properly broken in before we head off. I checked out a few stores while I was in town today (and by 'a few stores', I mean MEC) to get an idea of prices and what to look for. I'm a bit intimidated by the hiking boots mainly because I really have no idea what makes a good hiking boot. It because clear today while talking to the very nice and informative lady, that I will need to do some research online so I am better prepared to sound like I know what I'm doing next time I go in. For example, there's a difference between day hiking boots and multi-day hiking boots... I had no idea! It has to do with the construction of them to take your body weight or your body weight + a 50lbs backpack. But if you're doing a relatively flat multi-day hike (say, the Juan de Fuca or the West Coast Trail), you could possibly get away with a day hiking boot (which are usually cheaper).

I'm starting to think I should just let the moving scarecrow get me.