There is no turmoil going on and no issues that have presented barriers to life. We’re loving each other, taking care of one another, honoring and cherishing on a daily basis.

Waking up in the morning enjoying each others presence.

Taking care of the work that we’ve been tasked with great finesse.

Then coming home to the chores that daily life makes known and relaxing, letting the uck that life adheres to us, so that we can recoup and regather our wits.

But nothing extraordinary except for contentment has been occurring. And, we’re perfectly happy with that.

Yup, I woke up happy. SYRUPY OVER THE TOP BRIMMING WITH F&ING HAPPINESS!! Why might you ask? Well, let me tell you!
-We’re going to have brunch with a great friend whom my husband is trying to get her a job at his company. This isn’t a bite you in the ass situation because this chick can totally do the work.
-I’m going to get my first facial in ten years!
-My husband was awarded by the CEO of his new ‘old’ employer two tickets to tonight’s major league baseball game, right behind home plate in a luxury suite and a reserved parking pass. We get to be VIPs!

The only downer is my weight and I’m not even going to let me get me down. I’m going to stretch, walk and enjoy my body and how it functions today and make it stronger for tomorrow.

So, if any unhappy thoughts, bad ideas or foul moods want to ruin my sunshine, it’s not going to happen. I’m teflonning my good mood.

Sunshine and puppy dogs,

Jen

He wants to toilet train the cats.

If you knew how much litter we go through a year, you’d be helping the cats understand that the toilet is their friends. Sassy, with her ‘issue’, pees like a sprinkler. It’s fucking NUTS the amount of urine that comes out of her 13lb body. Anyway, with my back, it’s hard for me to clean out the litter boxes (yes, we have to have TWO) and the number of times we have to clean out said boxes, it’s exhausting.

During a trip to Petco, Brian found the Litter Kwitter. (Warming: video of cats shitting on a toilet)

It’s a potty training system with felines that gets them use to doing onesies and twosies over different trays that start out fully enclosed to a tray that is mostly a giant hole with a moat of litter around it. If this works, our life will be easy. Just go in and flush the toilet. And I’m sure B will devise a way to get the cats to enjoy the magical sounds of whirling water, so that they’ll flush after themselves. One can dream that our crazy antics will work!

But today was the day that I decided that walking was too hard and made this decision in front of others.

Was I committing an act of Tom Foolery? No.

Was I trying to exercise on my way to my office? No.

Was I simply doing something that I supposedly mastered approximately thirty years ago? Yes.

I wiped out in the hallway in a full blown, You Tube worthy method. No, there is no video. At least I hope not.

Oh God, I hope that security camera was there for show.

Really? I find the perfect, I MEAN PERFECT, A-Line skirt for my pear shape body on-line. (I’m not going to say where because I don’t want to give these people anything – and I’m lazy – probably why I can’t fit into their skirts.) I see it on a normal woman on a popular blog and I click the link. This leads to a PLETHORA of skirts and I’m giddy because this place has A-line skirts that hit right below the knee…it’s skirt heaven. The proportions look right and the materials have a great drape that are can transition from business to a casual Saturday afternoon.

Then I click to see what sizes these perfect skirts come in – Small through X-large. More giddiness abounds. Because right now, I’m extra large. There just happens to be more of me to love, thank you very much. But, I’ve accepted me as of right and I’m working on making me more compact to love but until then I’m going to dress for the right now.

Since it’s a new shopping site, I click on the sizing chart because I can tend to teeter into a large when some places use vanity sizing. No, this place uses the “bitch-slap-back-into-reality-of-how-fat-you-are-and-give-people-serious-eating-problem” sizing. Extra large for this dress maker is a 10-12. Yes, that’s right, a size 10 to 12. If you’re the average American woman and sporting the curves of a size 14, so sorry, they don’t want your business. That means I’m definitely out of the running because my size 16 (14 on a good day) ass is WAY too big and my wallet is not good enough for them to cut their clothes for anyone with waist bigger than 33″.

Yup, this company is telling over half of American women, “You’re too fat to wear our clothes”. Now, if this was a business that was housed out of a foreign country where most of their women are compact and petite, I’d be understanding. But, nope, this is a good ol’ USA company. And, yes, I do know that it’s the company’s prerogative to make clothes up to a certain size but to call a size 12 woman an extra large, that’s just insulting.

BAH! BAH ON YOU STUPID PERFECT SKIRT COMPANY!

This weekend I got to go to Stitches South, where my yarn dreams came true. There were a lot of little mom & pop yarn shops where they make one batch of a yarn in a specific colorway and that’s it. I’m now the proud owner of a lot of different sock yarns that will knit up into some wonderful gifts for people.

Of course, when I got home, I had to get approval of my purchases.

And, the ‘Reeling Machine’ is a yarn swift, a nice little tool that helps a hank of yarn convert into a nice yarn cake when used with a ball winder.

(PS. If anyone is looking for a wooden tabletop swift – non-umbrella type – mine is up for sale, email me for the price.)

I’m sorry. You worked really hard to get the weight off of this body and the me from twenty-seven to thirty-one hasn’t been keeping up our end of the bargain. We’ve allowed greasy fast food, cakes with decadent amounts of icing and laziness to take precedence over keeping the fat off that you worked so hard to remove. You would spend an hour or two every day (even on weekends!) at the gym, focusing on cardio and the weight machines. You wouldn’t leave the elliptical machine until you had hit five miles. Now, I get winded after walking one mile.

Thankfully, I didn’t let all eighty pounds come back, just the same thirty pounds that we’ve been fighting with since I got out of grad school. We did manage to get it off for almost nine months in 2007 but then decided a sedentary lifestyle was much more conducive to doing nothing.

And the food issue, we know how wonderful fresh vegetables from the farmer markets taste – the glory of produce that was picked the day before being consumed in it’s natural state, as God intended. But now we don’t allow that type of food in the house, the Oreos needed their place of honor on the counter.

And the soda. It’s a bad addiction that’s going to be hard to break. I realized this morning that I drink almost a two liter of diet soda a day. I can only imagine what I’ve been doing to the body you had dedicated to drinking 100 ounces of water, every day, for two years straight.

But today, I would’ve made you proud. Today, I realized the harm I was doing to my body by trying to hide the food I eat from myself. My distorted thought pattern was that if I hid the food from B, I was hiding it from my body as well. Those calories weren’t going to count because I devoured it in secret where no one could witness my downfall. Also, I stopped the soda, put it down and picked up the water glass instead.

Our next step, on this side of thirty-one, I’m going to cut out sugars. Only natural sugars will prevail on a daily basis with something ‘bad’ on occasion and in moderation.

I know that these promises have been made many times to our self but today feels different. Today, I realized what you did and accomplished – how hard it was to work for that goal and I appreciate what you did, reminds me that it is possible to go back to that body. I know it’s going to be harder because we’re no longer in our early-twenties but it’s not insurmountable.

Thank you for being there twenty-three. Now, it’s time to embrace thirty-one.

Love,

Jen

After four weeks of wearing this five pound contraption on my left foot (and let me tell you, the calf muscles on my left leg are GREAT!), it’s finally gone. And honestly, I’d do a happy dance if I could.

But today I had more x-rays before I got my pardon and I had the forethought to capture my bones for your viewing pleasure. Also, I have a weird fascination with x-rays.

This x-ray shows you my fracture on the day of the ‘incident’ as it’s currently being called. If you look above the mouse pointer, you’ll see the small crack in the fourth metatarsal. If only my grandmother, a former nurse, could see how I correctly used my limited knowledge of the skeletal system.

And today’s x-ray! It looks 10 times worse than the previous because the crack looks wider and it appears that I did more damage to myself since the original ‘incident’. But that’s the wrong line of thought. Because I don’t have the real x-ray image (these were captured with my iPhone), you’d see that there is new bone in the crevice. Also, I’m standing in the second x-ray because I can actually put weight on my foot again – that first x-ray, I was in a small amount of pain. There was no standing.

So, now you’ve had a bit of anatomy fun with Nutcase, I won’t scare you with the ugly (but comfortable) footwear that I’ll be wearing for the next six weeks.

It was 11:30 pm on a Saturday night. People around me were drinking, playing beer pong, making out in the corner or challenging each other to see who could do the longest keg stand. At the ripe old age of 24 and eleven months, I was too old for these sophomorish shenanigans.

The party was at someone’s rented house that I kind of knew through a friend that was in a class with a boy that was cute by my friend’s standards. Said friend wanted to an excuse to check out her classmate with full on beer goggles with the hope that he’d have his beer goggles on as well. Then who knew what would happen to them. (I think she had their wedding planned before we had entered said party door.)

I’d ended up at the party to make sure that my friend didn’t do anything stupid and because I needed to get out of the lab/library/apartment. Me, I was incredibly happy with my laptop or a book. They didn’t spill libations on me or try to pet my hair or (and honestly this happened and there are witnesses) lift me off of the dance floor in a He-Man-esque type move.

And this night wasn’t much different. There was one gentleman that had started drinking early in the evening and anyone with a pair of breasts was his target. Thankfully, I was able to tell him that the cute guy sitting on the couch was my boyfriend and that I was off the market. I scooted my way to the couch, sat down and started talking to the light-brown haired guy with a huge smile, like I had been looking for him everywhere. Thankfully, this tactic worked because my liquor lothario was on his way to his next target and I started up a really great conversation.

I had no clue who I was chatting with but we started talking, trying to figure out how we’d been conned into going to this gathering. We found out that we had a lot in common and decided that the couch was probably the safest place to stay while our ‘friends’ were off getting their party on. We chatted for two and a half hours until my friend came out of the back of the house crying because in true party fashion, her crush had a girlfriend but didn’t disclose this information until after my friend and he decided to see how much they could recall from Anatomy 101.

That meant I would be making a quick exit, needing to console my friend and said good-bye to cute guy on the couch.

My friend left whining about how glad she’d never marry her crush and I left with the contact information for my future husband.

Of course, it wasn’t on purpose. And I won’t go into boring detail but I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary when the event occurred. Alright, got the boring stuff out of the way.

But the one thing that I’ve learned about having a broken foot, is that bathroom stuff SUCKS! Especially on crutches. Yes, I know that you’re shocked that being handicapped isn’t a breeze. The worse is taking a shower. Stepping requires a full strategic plan from what foot goes where and how to use a crutch to support your body weight. Then the important events of shaving your legs are out the window because you can’t put your weight on the foot with the broken bone. Stupid broken bone, getting in the way of smooth calves. I guess I’ll start the ‘be like Mo’Nique, hairy leg freak’. (And if for some reason Mo’Nique reads this – covering all bases – I love you girlfriend and your new husband Oscar!)

Because my foot was the target, I decided that I was going to try to balance as much as possible on the good foot while trying to shampoo, condition, scrub, exfoliate, and rinse. Guess what I found out? I don’t have much of sense of balance at all. But I think you all figured that out when I told you that I broke my foot. Thankfully, B was nearby in case I needed because after getting out of the shower, which required hurdle/tub jumping (I’m so ready for the 2012 games!), he helped me put on my pants. I’d go with skirts because they don’t require leg shimmying but please see last line of previous paragraph. I’m not that bold yet to show my new leg beards off.

So, now we’re all up-to-date. Tomorrow, I find out how bad the damage truly is to the metatarsal and determine if surgery is needed. We’re going with ‘please no surgery, I’ll be good and where the boot’ begging stance when I see the doctor. Until next time.