Tag, I’m It! My “Next Big Thing”

The Next Big Thingis a blog meme going around in the blog-o-sphere, and Cammy at Tippy Toe Diet asked if she could tag me to keep it going, sort of like Friendship Bread only carb-free!

Cammy’s Next Big Thingis a gathering of goals she’s put under the umbrella of “daring greatly.” She was tagged to continue the meme by Sharon at Midlife Moments, whose Next Big Thing is menopause.

My Next Big Thingwill make noise. Literally. And I hope to god my mother isn’t reading this.

I’m going to learn to drive ride this (A reader corrected me saying you ride a bike, both as the person who is in charge of it and the person riding on the back. It seems confusing, but if that's the rule, that's the rule!):

This is the Irishman’s Harley, a 1999 Sportster 883, that I’ve had the pleasure of riding on the back of only once and only briefly because spring didn’t get the groundhog’s memo that it’s supposed to start warming up.  

I rode on the back of a motorcycle for the first time two years ago (see “A Mental Miracle”) and went from scared-to-death to badass-in-love in zero to 60. Motorcycle Owner and I only dated for a few more months, so I didn’t get too much additional riding time, but the thrill of the ride never left me.

Knowing this, a friend suggested I take the a Motorcycle Safety Training class after he took it and bought a used Honda Sportster last year. It seemed absurd at the time. Learn to drive ride a motorcycle? Such a foreign concept. As liberated as I am, driving  riding a bike seemed like a guy thing. Women rode on the back. But a seed was planted, and like the crocuses in my yard - despite the wicked weather - it will bloom.

One in 10 motorcycle owners are women. Not great stats, but those women are out there, and I am determined to join their ranks. I just have to learn how to drive ride one first, something I know almost nothing about. But, hey, I didn’t know anything about driving a stick shift when my dad took me with him to test drive a 1974 Mustang in 1980 when I was a junior in high school. He drove us to a parking lot, got out of the car, and said, “If you drive this back to the dealership, I’ll buy it for you.” Believe me, I learned REAL fast how to drive a stick.

When I married farmer Bruce, he taught me to drive a skid loader, an old Ford pickup with the stick on the column (the 3-speed “H” pattern), a tractor, and a 10-speed Mack truck. Getting behind the wheel of an enclosed vehicle is always fun. But there are no steering wheels on motorcycles. Or doors or windows or anything holding you in. You shift with your left foot, including your toes, and you brake with your right hand as well as your foot, and people warn you about how dangerous they are and they call people who love motorcycles “organ donors” and you’d think that would be enough to scare me away.

But it doesn’t. This is just the kind of challenge I’ve been looking for. Something so outside my comfort zone that I need field glasses to see it. It also gives me something more fun than my 2013 taxes to save for.

I’ll start small (and used), perhaps a Suzuki Marauder GZ125. It weighs what I did at my heaviest!

Or a Honda Rebel 250

Or a Star Motorcycles V Star 250. Look how awesome she looks driving that!

Or a Yamaha Virago 250. Not sure I can pull off leather pants, but I'll definitely get chaps.

So there you have it. My Next Big Thing. I promise I’ll do everything within my power to stay safe. In the meantime, I’m hoping for warmer weather very soon so I can start riding on the back of that Harley and begin learning all I can about driving it one day.

I’ve tagged Sharon from Gains and Losses: Life ThroughSharon’s Eyes to keep this Next Big Thing chain going. I just know she’ll come up with her own uber cool challenge!

The "C" Word

Someone once told me I think too much. He meant it as a dis, but I took it as a compliment. “We are what we think,” said the Buddha. “All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”

Something I’ve been thinking about and working to understand for quite a while now is “commitment.” How do I define it? How have I succeeded or failed, and why I’ve succeeded or failed? It’s been a difficult and yet, as best I can tell, an honest inquiry.

Commitment is not easy for me. I’ve known this for years. When my husband died, I subconsciously identified commitment with suffering, or more specifically, I believed if I committed to someone, they would leave me. Commitment became less of a promise and more of a tentative maybe, a “let’s wait and see” thing that offered an out if things got difficult, scary, tough…fill in the blank.

This isn’t to say I lack the ability to commit to something. It took a lot of commitment to lose 150+ pounds, and it’s taking even more commitment to maintain. But it’s easier to make a commitment to myself than to others. If I let myself down, I only hurt myself. Letting someone else down not only hurts myself and others, but it spawns guilt, and who wants to live with guilt, right? Ergo, don’t commit too much to someone else.

Since my divorce in 2010, it’s been crazy strange living alone, and at first it was very difficult. But I’ve come a long way since I wrote “Let The Mauling Begin” in May 2011. Living alone has helped me understand myself better and has taught me many things, from the simple (grocery shopping for one, cooking for one) to the more complex (changing the locks on the doors and turning off the main water valve to the house). I was in a relationship for a while, and have recently started dating again, but I’m not looking to commit to anyone, at least not in the long-term. Part of that is my still-exploratory look at my relationship to commitment, but it’s also become clear to me – through journaling and meditation and hours spent talking with friends and Julie T. Therapist – that there’s more of me for me to know. Alone.

However….just because I’m not looking to share a toothbrush holder with a two-legged creature doesn’t mean I don’t want to share space with a four-legged one. A dog seemed a better conduit to embracing relational commitment than the two-legged right now. And so I spent the last few months looking for Alice. I finally found her – through the help of a network of rescue organizations and their dedicated volunteers – at a shelter in Marietta, Ohio, where she’d been placed after being removed from a home with 28 dogs.

I introduced you to Alice last week after I sprained my knee and aggravated my arthritis (see “A New Dog and an Old Knee”). One of the hardest things to convince people with arthritis to do is to move, and I’m no exception. Over the last several months, unless I’m going to my volunteer job or babysit the grandkids, my morning routine is: get up, make tea, sit down, and sit. And sit some more. Then around 10 a.m. I decide…sigh…that I should work out. After all, exercise is something I’ve been committed to for nearly six years! But working out means standing up and…whaaaaa!! It’s easier to sit! Then Alice wakes up and snorts and paws at me, and so I bundle up and take her out, and darn it if walking her doesn’t loosen up the old knee! And because we walk more than once a day, I stay more limber throughout the day, which in turn, makes me more excited about working out.

Who’s a good dog?

I understand that commitment is a choice and a promise – not a tentative maybe – and it takes a conscious effort every day to stick to it, through thick and thin. Have I been happy with some of Alice’s choices? No. But that’s why god invented carpet cleaner. Has she been happy with some of my choices? Probably not, as evidenced by the vomit she left in the back seat of my car. But I’m committed to helping Al be the best dog she can be, and, while I can’t speak for her exactly, she seems pretty committed to making me a better human.

A Day Like No Other

Today is the 30th anniversary of the day my life changed forever. As many of you know, my husband died on March 22, 1983, when I was 19 years old and our daughter, Carlene, was 11 days old.

I suspect we all have a day or a moment in time that changed us, either by choice or by circumstance. Please, if you feel you can, share your day or moment in the comments below.

Here’s a glance into a few hours of that day, a day so long ago and yet still stings me to my soul:

It was a Tuesday. My Aunt Mavis called the house just before noon. My mom, who was staying with us for a few weeks, answered the phone while I folded laundry and watched “All My Children.” She put her hand over the receiver and asked, “Did Bruce go to town?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I thought he was working in the machine shed. Let me check.”

I opened the front door and called out his name. The sun was bright and the air was a promising 40 degrees. I saw a train stopped on the tracks a half mile from our farm and remembered hearing a whistle blowing longer than usual about an hour earlier. I called to Bruce again. Duke, our German Shepherd, was curled up on the rug at the bottom of the step, a sure sign Bruce wasn’t on the property.

I went back inside. Mom hung up the phone. Mavis heard there’d been a train accident, she said.

My mouth went dry.

“Call David,” I said and turned off the television. David was our pastor and a member of the volunteer ambulance crew.

David’s wife answered and Mom asked her if there’d been an accident.

Please, please, please say no. Please say no. I covered my heart with my hands.

Mom’s face went sheet white.

“Thank you,” she said and hung up the phone. Our eyes met. I knew.

“Lynnie,” her voice trembled. “Bruce is dead. David’s on his way here.”

You know how when you rip off an adhesive bandage and the pain doesn’t hit for a few seconds? The same thing happens when you find out your husband is dead. It takes your brain awhile to understand what you just heard. Even then it doesn’t sink in because the reality is just too big to grasp in the space of a few seconds.

I walked into the kitchen for a glass of water and to turn off the pork chops simmering on the stove. I stared out the window at the south end of our lawn. I thought about the garden I wanted to plant there and made a mental note to remind Bruce to till that up for me. Then David’s car and my brother-in-law’s pickup came speeding around the corner. 

Wait. Bruce isn’t here anymore.

I met them at the door. They’d both been crying.

David wrapped me in his arms and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t cry. I wanted to throw up.

We sat down on the couch and I asked Mom to get my wedding ring out of my jewelry box. I’d taken it off a few months earlier because my fingers swelled. My hand shook as she handed me the small band, and I forced it past my knuckle.

“Do you want something to drink?” someone asked.

“No.”

“Eat?”

“No.”

“You’ll need to keep up your strength to nurse.”

“I know,” I said. But I didn’t eat for another day.

I looked down at my body clothed in gray sweat pants and Bruce’s long-sleeved South Dakota State University t-shirt. My breasts leaked like sieves, and I was littered with stitches and hemorrhoids. It was one thing to feel vulnerable because I was overweight. Fat I understood. On my wedding day, my first thought as I walked down the aisle wasn’t, “I’m getting married!” It was, “Oh god, people are going to look at my ass!” But no amount of feeling fat prepared me for what crept through my bloated, post-partum body; a feeling so raw that it settled in my bones like damp winter cold.

From what little experience I had with the formalities of death, I knew people would soon come to our farm armed with casseroles and desserts to pay their respects. Still shaking, I changed out of my sweats and hoped no one noticed I hadn’t dusted or cleaned the bathroom in a week.

A New Dog And An Old Knee

I wish I could say I did it dancing an Irish jig in a fine pub with a handsome Irishman after putting back a pint of Guinness. But alas, there was no dancing, no fine pub, and no pint. (But there was a handsome Irishman *grin*)

I spent a good portion of Sunday afternoon in the ER learning what I might have done to my already horrific right knee on Saturday night. I’d felt it twist a bit when I stood up from my office chair and turned slightly to put my computer to sleep. (My computer being a rebuilt ProBook laptop, sent to me via my accidental damage warranty, to replace the ProBook that couldn’t handle its liquor. One glass of wine and it was toast. See "Armed and Less Dangerous") It was nothing too noticeable, nothing painful, until I tried to walk and my knee buckled like an asphalt driveway on a 100-degree day. My kneecap moved all over the place, like a silver ball in a plastic-domed cardboard puzzle. I could NOT get that sucker back in place.

When I awoke the next morning, my knee had swollen to the size of a small cantaloupe. To get downstairs, I had to sit and slide. My toes were numb and my foot was cold. It was time to hit the ER.

The doctor said I most likely sprained it and tore some ligaments, but without an MRI, he couldn’t know exactly what was wrong. One look at my knee on a good day and you know it's toast. It’s been living on borrowed time since I was 18 and I’ll be 50 in five months. It's accrued a lot of interest in 32 years. But like an old car you can’t afford to replace, I just keep changing the oil, hoping she’ll give me a few more miles.

We nixed the MRI idea because it would be a waste of time and money. I assumed the doctor would suggest draining the fluid, as I’ve had done many times before, but he said the arthritis and the bone spurs would make draining more difficult and he didn’t want to risk aggravating my knee any further or cause infection. He said I needed to wear a knee stabilizer and follow the RICE principal – rest, ice, compression, elevation.

I waited until he left my room to shed a few tears. This knee dealio couldn’t have come at a worse time. I just adopted a beautiful 18-month-old coon hound/lab mix on Friday. Her original name was Whitney, but she doesn’t look like or act like a Whitney. I thought about Sid, but g-baby Claire said she already has too many Sidney’s in her life (Sidney her best friend and Sidney Crosby, her favorite hockey player). So I named her Alice because I like "White Rabbit" and because her back legs reminded me a little of my great-grandmother Alice’s legs: skinny and slightly bowed.

Except for the three hours I spent out with the Irishman Saturday night, I’ve been with Alice constantly since Friday morning. We’re attached like flies on stink (and she does sometimes stink as her body adjusts to new food…yikes!). Underweight, my job is to help Alice gain 8 pounds, which I’d happily give her if liposuction transfer was possible. Alice’s job is to get me out of the house and be more active. That’s going to be a challenge with a bum knee.

A nurse came in with the brace and she saw me wiping my eyes.

“I want to tell you something…” she began, and I thought, ‘Here we go. Another well-intentioned person who has a friend who has a friend who had her knee replaced when she was 79 and she wondered why she didn’t do it sooner.’ I hear that story all the time.

“I’m 56 and have been an ER nurse for 30 years,” she said. “I’m on my feet for long hours at a time. Several years ago, my right knee started hurting. It kept getting worse until two years ago, I decided to see an orthopedic surgeon. He told me, ‘How in the hell do you expect me to fix something like that when you’re so damn fat?’”

I gasped.

“Yup, that’s what he said. But he replaced my knee and it was the best thing I’d ever done for myself,” she said.  

“Wait,” I said, still reeling from her doctor’s comment. “He spoke to you like that and you let him operate?”

She laughed. “He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I know I’m fat. I have been all my life. I’ve never been thin like you.”

As she wrapped my knee in the brace, I thought about all the assumptions floating around the room – hers and mine – and about how much easier it is to assume than it is to remain curious and open-minded. 

The older I get, the more I think I know, when the truth is – to quote Smash Mouth – my brain gets smart but my head gets dumb. This is particularly true when it comes to things I fear, like knee replacement. I recycle old, unexamined thoughts or turn a blind eye to the truth.

Isn't she a beaut? I might be able to get a few more miles out of her (Is there anything a hot bath won't cure?), but I will give knee replacement a little less resistance and a little more thought, especially now that Alice will be needing my knees to keep up with her for the next 13 years or so.

Armed and Less Dangerous

This is a stock photo. I was too bummed to take a photo of my spill.

A strange thing happened when I tipped a glass of wine on my laptop Thursday night. I didn’t get mad. I didn’t panic. And although it wasn’t the brightest thing I’ve ever done, I didn’t scream and yell and call myself an idiot. I simply assessed the situation with a quiet, “Crap,” wiped up the wine with some paper towels, and went to bed.

The next morning, I called Hewlett Packard (thank goodness for accidental damage warranties), and had a 45-minute conversation with a call center representative located somewhere in Asia. I jumped through a bunch of hoops (yes, I know to plug in the power supply to a working outlet) until the representative decided that my computer wasn’t going to power on and said HP would send me a box in which to return my computer for service or replacement.

While I had predicted the outcome and would rather have spent those 45 minutes doing something more productive, I didn’t stress, at least not in that, “Oh my god, I have to solve this NOW!” kind of way. The coolest part of this not-so-stressed state was that I was able to notice how, during that 45-minute conversation, my mind drifted into thinking it would be a good idea to eat my way through the groceries I’d bought the day before – the hummus and the cottage cheese, the plums and popcorn. I also thought about my last AIM post on what’s different this time, and more of my maintenance story unfolded.

When I started this journey in 2005, I had a one-track mind. I was going to DO it! No matter what! Then I got to maintenance and I was going to DO it! No matter what! But “no matter what” became a divorce and grandchildren and school and additional arthritis issues, and my one-track mind turned into a cornucopia of coping mechanisms.

But what’s different this time is that I was able to identify many of those coping mechanisms and sit with them and not completely fold in on myself. I gained some pounds, but I stopped them from multiplying. Why? Because I finally “get” that I have a “weighted” past and that I have a propensity to gain weight just by looking in a bakery window. I don’t like it, I wish it wasn’t true, but I can wish and not like all I want, but the truth is, I have to pay attention.

AND…and this is most important…I have to care enough about myself to not call myself an idiot when I screw up. Because the reality is: I will screw up and I will respond. But that response doesn’t have to include eating my way through my refrigerator or speaking cruelly to myself. A simple acknowledgment of the screw up will suffice, along with a thoughtful plan on how to improve or solve the situation.

I’m not looking forward to loading all that software back on to my new or refurbished computer, or recreating bookmarks and bookmark folders in Firefox, but I’m arming myself with self-kindness for the task. Self-kindness that involves working out before and probably after, and allowing myself to eat things I’ve identified, for me, as healthy comfort food. Things like hummus and veggies, sardines, edamame (in the shell…finger food!), smoked almonds, Jarlsburg lite, Honeycrisp apples, and roasted asparagus.

And now that I know laptops don’t like chardonnay, I will separate the glass from the computer from now on. Yes, that’s probably obvious to the savvy among you reading, and I’m sure this won’t be my last time around the self-evident block. But I’ll be armed and less dangerous next time.

“Likes walks on the beach…”

After celebrating my beautiful daughter’s 30^thbirthday last night at a Japanese hibachi grill, I wasn’t sure the five hours of sleep I got and the daylight standard time thing would put me in the mood for outdoor activity today. But when it’s 66 degrees in March AND sunny, and you live in a place where you’re sun-deprived for nine months of the year, you learn real quick how to put on your big girl panties and get out there, despite your sake headache…I mean, sleep deprivation.

Nothing was keeping me off the bike trail. Well, almost nothing. I’ll get to that in a minute.

I dug my bike out from hibernation and pumped up the tires and attached the bag and the odometer/speedometer computer thingy (that’s the technical term, I’m pretty sure). I attached the bike rack to my spare tire (remind me to ask for a trailer hitch and new bike rack for my birthday this year) and hoisted my bike onto it. Then I spent a minute staring at the strap I use to secure the bike to the rack like I’d never seen it before. It’s only been four months and change since I’d done it before, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember how I threaded that thing around my bike. After four tries, those brain cells came back to life and my bike was securely attached to the rack.

I chose to get on the trail in the small town of Marwood because I wanted to see the cows and turkeys I hadn’t seen since October. It’s also where a relatively open part of the trail begins and thought it was my best bet for a dry(er) ride. I shifted my bike into four-wheel drive – relatively speaking – and started pedaling. I never got above 8 miles per hour, the mud was so thick. My lungs and thighs were working overtime. ‘Killer workout!’ I thought. I was psyched.

Then…wham!  

Did I mention we had 10 inches of snow last Tuesday? Yeah…I kind of forgot about that.

 

I turned around and four-wheeled back to the Jeep. I strapped the bike back on the rack, and then took off in the other direction on foot. I had The Black Keys on my iPod and the sun in my face…I was ready to power walk.

On vacation in southern CA, 2008

I knew right away this wasn’t going to be an ordinary walk. Suddenly, it was 2008, and the bike trail had turned into Topanga Beach in southern California. Talk about wet sand! ‘Killer workout’ I thought, and I was psyched for the second time in an hour.

I walked for two miles as briskly as I could, and my thighs and knees felt every step. They will hate me tomorrow, but too bad, so sad. That's why god created Advil. I need my biking legs back in working order, and the sooner the better. Biking helps me think and work out the mental kinks, and I’ve definitely accumulated some of those over the winter. Have you? What are you looking forward to most as the weather improves and the days get longer?

AIM: What’s Different This Time

"AIM: Adventures in Maintenance is Lynn, Lori, Debby, Shelley, and Cammy, former weight-loss bloggers who now write about life in maintenance. We formed AIM to work together to turn up the volume on the issues facing people in weight maintenance. We publish a post on the same topic on the first Monday of each month. Let us know if there is a topic you'd like us to address!"

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“The more I know, the less I understand
“All the things I thought I’d figured out, I have to learn again.” 

From the song Heart of the Matter by Don Henley

I can’t find my darts. I’ve looked everywhere. They’re a pretty metallic blue with a silver band around the middle, and they have a solid grip that helped me shoot a fair number of bullseyes back in the 90s. I was hoping to resurrect those glory days at a pub I discovered a few weeks ago. But alas, my lovely blue darts have gone missing.

When we were in the process of forming AIM, we discussed the “hows” of maintenance. We’d all lost weight several times before and failed to keep it off, so we talked about how the “hows” this time were different. Lori summed it up this way: “Maintenance isn't always hitting the bullseye, but it’s continuing to try with every shot, and sometimes taking a step back to sharpen the darts.”

Maintenance was never something I’d taken seriously. Whenever I got to a weight goal, my first thought was, ‘Finally, I can eat again!’

When I got to goal on March 12, 2007, what was different this time was that I’d spent two years, two months and 12 days learning how to eat rather than merely eating as a means to an end. To some it may seem obvious, but for me I had to learn that it wasn’t smart to celebrate goal with a Dairy Queen Oreo Blizzard and a corn dog, and that a sleeve of Thin Mints wasn’t a reward.

Maintenance is different this time, too, because I’m not maintaining alone. As much as I’d like to not talk about last weekend’s “white food” high or admit my lame excuses for not exercising,  “confessing” my struggles to and celebrating my successes with others who also struggle and succeed keeps me connected to my original intention for starting this journey: to honor myself by living a more healthy lifestyle.

But just as I seek the counsel and camaraderie of people who “get it,” I still sometimes lose my intentions to the words of others who don’t. For instance, I’ve not kept secret on my blog or amongst my maintainer friends my desire to lose the 20 pounds I’ve gained since my divorce in 2010. I mentioned this recently to a few people outside my “weight world” and their response was, in a nutshell, “Why? You look fine the way you are.”

Well hand me the bread and pass the butter! I look OK, so I can stop all this paying attention nonsense! Dessert? Yes, please! I’m tired this morning? Forget the gym!

“As if…” whispers the maintainer inside me.

And that’s what’s different about what’s not different this time.

This time, it’s not about looking fine for other people, or, to a larger extent, merely accepting myself as I am. It’s about taking that step back and sharpening those darts.

I know what’s best for me and I know to not measure my intentions against other people’s expectations. Sure, I admit I take in the comments (“You don’t need to lose any weight!” or, my favorite, “You were too skinny before.”), and I live with them for awhile, maybe eat a little more than I should, but I have the capacity and – more importantly – the desire to reign myself back in, to remind myself of my priorities.

I may have lost my pretty blue metallic darts, but I’ve not lost sight of the bullseye, and that’s what makes all the difference this time.

Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts, and if you haven’t already, check out what my fellow AIM bloggers’ have to say about this subject.

Lori @ Finding Radiance

Debbie @ debby weighs in

Shelley @ My Journey to Fit

Cammy @ The Tippy Toe Diet