Buck Up, Cupcake

I am in Week 4 of P90x, which is a "recovery week".  Next week, I start a new schedule of workouts, after falling in love with 4/7ths of the ones I've been doing for 3 weeks now.  I'm trying to get through this first 90 days without doing the thing I usually do, which is to completely deconstruct somebody else's plan and make it whatever I want it to be.  But I do already have in my head the idea of building a 7-day rotation that changes every few weeks, but is what I want to do from the P90x choices, while adding in other things that aren't necessarily "a beautiful thing".  Sorry Tony.  Don't get me wrong, I don't have this plan because I think P90x isn't working or I think it could work better - I'm just making long-term plans for myself, and what I enjoy.  And if I enjoy it, I'm far more likely to show up.  Right now, showing up is easy on four day out of seven, and it doesn't have anything to do with the intensity of the workouts - they are all really fucking hard.  There's no picking the easy one out of the bunch.  My favorite four days are the ones that hurt the worst, require the most of me mentally, and burn for much longer.

So what have I gotten out of four weeks of intense pain?  A few pounds and a few inches.  I'm not quite ready to deal with real numbers related to the scale yet, though I'm getting closer to that point.  But for some reason, the real measurement numbers don't frighten me at all, so here is the breakdown:

Bust:  +/- 0

Waist:  -4.25 inches

Hips:  -1 inch

Thigh:  -1.25 inches

Arm: -0.5 inch

No bust loss.  That has to be a first for me.  They are usually the first to go. 

Anyway.  Four weeks down, nine more to go.  Huzzah.

I submitted an essay to Indie Ink last week about this category on the blog, about how I never write here, how I hide it from RSS and hide it from the front page and never Tweet or Facebook the links on the rare occasion that I file something here.  How even though I hate defining myself by what I write on the blog, I define myself by the thing, the condition of me, that I never allow myself to discuss here.

I don't know if the essay will get published, but just writing it, sending it off, knowing that Anastacia read it . . . those thoughts alone have brought me back to this category three times a day for a week.  Wondering when I'd work up the nerve to write something, publish it, file it here.  Whether I'd have the nerve to make it public.

I've gone with half and half.  This entry is not visible from the front page, but I didn't suppress it from the RSS feed this time.  Limited vulnerability?  Throwing something out there to see who comes out and says hello?

I'm also thinking about renaming the category, as it's a little negative.  We'll see.

So as of this morning, I'm at my lowest weight since June of 2007.  I don't know why the "decades" mean so much to me, why crossing the line from a number that ends in 0 to a number that ends in 9 is such a monumental event, when one pound separates them, but it is, and I crossed one, and I was so happy about it that I took a photo of the scale with Lou and emailed it to two friends who were eagerly awaiting that milestone along with me.

A few weeks, that's all it took.  To get through an entire decade of scale digits.  A few more weeks, and I'll be doing it again.  And doing it the right way for the first time in my adult life, I think.

Every morning, I wake up to Tony Horton's face, a pile of free weights, a spreadsheet full of data that gets examined and updated.  Every time I open the fridge, I ponder the question of why I never before allowed myself to eat mashed sweet potatoes, a slice of Canadian bacon, and cucumbers for breakfast.  Or eggs as a snack. 

I'm already in smaller clothes.  Today, a brightly colored company-logo polo that I haven't worn in so long that my coworkers asked if it was new.

I'm already feeling the results in my endurance, strength, and flexibility.

I'm already sleeping better every night, even though I'm collapsing into bed each night moaning and groaning about aches and soreness.

All these good things that have already happened.  And yet?  Clicking publish on this? 

Terrifying.

I have watched the sun come up three days in a row from Baumann Park. While I'd love to provide a Forrrest Gump-style vivid description of the purple-orange sky reflecting off of the mirrored surface of the lake, the truth is that every morning, for at least the first 15 minutes that I'm there, all I can think about is the smell.

A week ago, part of the park was under water, from the Kishwaukee River. It's probably been happening on and off all summer long. So that part of the park has a mucky river-bottom stench that is a little bit suffocating. Wrecks loves it. Wrecks loves the stinky park even more than he loves rolling in stinky things in the yard.

We are there so early in the morning now that the only other creatures we encounter are old men, fishing. This morning, Wrecks and I were walking past a small tree when a flock of birds came hurtling out of the tree right in front of us. One of them was flying so low that he either clipped Wrecks or Wrecks flinched because he was so close. It was hard to tell.

Wrecks stopped right there, turned around and looked at me, and the expression on his face was clearly "DUUUUDE, did you see that?"

Duke is still in the process of finishing some areas of our basement. When he's done, the two little rooms in the back will swap places. Our "gym" - my elliptical machine and all of his weightlifting equipment - will move to the area that is now occupied by his poker table, and he will be putting a pool table where the gym is now.

He's already started decorating the one finished wall, preparing for his Manly Man Room, which means that when I'm on the elliptical machine at 5 am every day, I'm staring at a seriously giant poster of the Miller Light girls in the catfight. You remember the ad, right? Two girls dining out get into an argument about whether the best part about Miller Lite is that tastes great or is less filling, and they end up tearing off their clothes and fighting in a fountain in just their bras and panties. So we have like an 8' long photo of them, all wet, in their underwear, and underneath it is still frames from the fight scene. Then the entire end of the poster is a giant bottle of ice cold beer.

Now I know that I could look at this image and think lots of inspiring things about physical fitness, but you know me better than that. At about 5:10 am every single goddamn day, the only thought in my mind is "Damn, I want a beer."

This is a story that couldn't have existed without the internet. Man, I love the internet.

I also love peanut butter, specifically peanut butter and fruit. Peanut butter and apples, peanut butter and bananas. I love peanut butter. But I'm one of those all-or-nothing kind of girls when it comes to peanut butter. Give me a whole jar and I will snack on peanut butter all day. So I had started to put one little serving of peanut butter in the tiniest container I have, taking it to work with me, having my apple, and taking the container home each night to wash it. It sucked.

Then one day, one of my coworkers wandered through the office carrying one of these:

And somehow I just knew that all of the problems in the whole world had been solved.

3/4 ounce of peanut butter in it's own carrying case. Peanut butter in my purse! Peanut butter in my desk! The possibilities are endless really. But where to buy them? I tracked down the coworker. He had swiped it off of a restaurant table. I searched online, where I found plenty of descriptions but no place to buy.

Then while chatting about my peanut butter woes, an internet friend in the Meat Buying Industry (you all need a friend in that industry, just don't take mine, she's taken, she belongs to me) said "Hey! I can order those for you." So she did. This morning, an entire case of them arrived on my doorstep. I have to split it with Kari when she arrives this weekend, but that still leaves me with 100 of them. 100 days worth of peanut butter. Mmmmm.

The only thing that could possibly challenge my love of peanut butter is Sunbutter, made from sunflower seeds. A product of good ol' Fargo, I first tried Sunbutter in my Grandma's kitchen, and I immediately rushed to her local grocer to buy it before returning to Illinois. My grocery store here carries the natural variety in the healthnut aisle, so I tend to stick to that one, though I occasionally order the chunky and honey flavors online. Pretty much everyone in my Illinois life thinks that Sunbutter tastes like ass, but for those of who grew up in North Dakota, Sunbutter is just a creamy version of our crack - sunflower seeds. It is the very best part of watching a softball game at the high school, it is driving around in a pickup truck with the windows down. It is amazing.

And now I see that it's also available in snack packs, though these are 1.5 ounces. Hmmm. That's a lot of Sunbutter for one snack. I'll have to see how the baby peanut butters fit into my life first.