...for me to suffer computer withdrawal.

It is a quarter to 7 on a gorgeous Friday evening, and here I am, AT WORK. I'm not even working! My computer died a week ago, and Mike and Rod are kindly rebuilding me a new one, but I'm starting to get itchy.

Mike loaned me his OLPC, and while very cute and charming, and fully up to the task of a BBS telnet session, the browser is horrible.

Maybe the enforced computer vacation is good for me, I did get a fair amount of spring cleaning done...but when my ipod runs out of juice, I'll have to challenge myself to run in silence. It will be good for me, I'm sure. I wonder what else I could accomplish without those distractions?

My friend Holly has been questioning the value of a Bachelor's Degree, and asked about our experiences...Looking back on college, would we do it all over again? There were so many thoughtful replies, and now that I have been out of college for almost as long as I was in it, it seemed a good opportunity to think about the decisions of education, career, and expensive achievements. So here is my diatribe.



I spent a full decade struggling in college and came out with a professional bachelor’s degree (a degree that would ordinarily only take 5 years). My college career was filled with a lot of anxiety and doubt, and there were many, many times when I suspected that I really just wanted to become a housewife without children. But I feared that that sounded too lazy, and I too felt that some amount of my self worth was predicated on having a career, and I figured that degree=career.

It is the most straight-forward decision, after all. Go to college, get the degree, get the desk job, go to parties and chat up how interesting and fucking fulfilling your work is. That dream requires precious little imagination, and so I stuck to it, in part because of the fear of trying to come up with something better than that. I admire anyone who has had an untraditional approach to work and life and made it work well for them.

It may sound strange, but I always wanted the desk job, or at least something white collar. My parents were farmers, but I was the bookish kid that didn’t understand why anyone would work outside when there were more interesting options that didn’t involve getting a sunburn, reeking of sweat, or inhaling dust.

I frittered away much time and money (borrowed against the future) trying to figure out what interesting degree would equate to a desired job. I loved studying linguistics, and was only one class away from a degree in it, but I didn’t see that it would lead me to an enjoyable applicable job. I tried out speech pathology, in a lame attempt to connect the linguistics studies into something with job prospects, but found that I hated clinical environments.

Sometimes it takes an outside perspective. Mike tossed out landscape architecture as an option, and the more I studied it, the more I knew: this had EVERYTHING I was interested in, good at, and had prospects. I felt like I finally discovered gold.

I was so excited. In fact, I was so excited about all my coursework that I typically flew madly and deeply into the class subject matter immediately, burned out by mid-term, started skipping classes, and then went into avoidance/fear/denial/terror mode. This happened with about a quarter of my classes. I got some psychological help, learned some coping strategies, but mostly got through it all with help from an amazingly supportive, encouraging, and loving husband. I simply committed to it, and didn’t look back.

Was it worth it? Who knows. I see no need to second-guess the decision now. I spent a lot of money and time in school, and while it was certainly stressful, I enjoyed learning, and I have derived a lot of satisfaction in simply getting things done. I’ve learned that sometimes I just need to push through something and stop thinking so much about it. I find that my stress levels go down if I can just move forward and block out a lot of my doubts.

And my job is good, and good to me. And it’s not something I could have done without the degree. I have overcome many of the doubts and obsessions of my college years, and was able to obtain licensure and LEED certification in record time. I found the work to be far less anxiety-inducing than college ever was, and for that I am eternally grateful. I’m not sure there really is such a thing as a “dream career”,  but this has been awfully close. It suits me well enough. I have my moments, but it has been a good ride so far.

There is, though, one thing I have never really adjusted to:  I’m not crazy about working 8 hour days, 320 days of the year…that part seems excessive and not very human. Yes, yes, I know that that is a typical American schedule, but honestly, my parents didn’t work that much. Having two stay-at-home parents was completely normal when I was growing up, and I think it gave me a skewed perspective on the whole work-life balance thing.

Or maybe I’m just lazy, after all.

All we tried was the chocolate chip cookie and a piece of carrot cake.
 
The carrot cake was excellent...chock full of my favorites: raisins and walnuts.  The cookie was messy, a bit dry and granular, but with great flavor. If I were a vegan with celiac disease, I think I would be in heaven.

The prices are a little high, but given the care they give with ingredients, I'd say it's justified. My biggest problem is with their serving sizes. We would have liked to have sampled more things, but the cookie and piece of cake served 8. There was no variety at all in sizes: they were all ginormous. The "thumbprint" cookies could not have been formed by a human thumb. I think a lot of Seattle bakeries fall prey to this, but it just makes a lot of people less likely to try their treats when they're so large. I have seen individual brownies in this town that are not much smaller than an entire pan of brownies. Cafe Louisa is a big offender.
 
So yeah, I'd go back to the Flying Apron. I'd just make sure I had a house full of people to feed their goodies.

Okay, all you vegan non-glutinous folks out there...I have a tricky one:

My brother, his wife, and three teenage daughters have a long layover on their trip to Hawaii, so I thought I would fill it up with a quick city tour and lunch at our house. Their taste runs along the lines of upper midwestern, bland, overcooked, non-adventurous (i.e., no fish, no spicy, no "weird").
 
So, what should I make for lunch?

The other wrinkle is that I am picking them up around 11, after working the morning, so something made beforehand would be nice.

Maybe I'll stop by the flying apron bakery tonight. Sucks that they moved.

Today is Veteran’s Day, and the weather is appropriately cold, dark, and grim. Although I don’t have any friends or relatives in the military, it is a good day to reflect on the work and sacrifice of  Americans less selfish than myself.

I have lived a very calm and cushy life, made possible by the people who came before me. My grandfather was briefly in WWI and considered it the great adventure of his youth. He encouraged his sons into war, and two of my uncles came back from WWII shell-shocked and forever psychologically broken. My mother’s first husband, father of three of my siblings, died as a result of pneumonia he contracted in the mountains of Korea. My father served in Germany after the war, and told us stories of the starving people being fed by the Allies, their former enemies.

Whenever I heard about the Marshall Plan, and the ideals of generosity and forgiveness it promoted, I would feel pride about my country. These past years, though, such pride has been hard to muster. With an ill-conceived war still straining us, we leave an impression of a thoughtless, selfish, hostile, paranoid country, so far afield of the values this country strives for. I wonder if we can get back to a country deserving of the pride I once held for it. After this election, I hold out hope. We'll see what Veteran's Day 4 years from now looks like. It will probably still be raining.

No, I am not watching soccer.
 
This delayed post is to report that I reached my weight goal of 144.0 exactly 1 year and one week from starting to lose.

70 pounds gone, and now comes the much longer phase of this project: maintenance. I think I can honestly say that losing all this weight required relatively little deprivation, just some imagination and persistence. So I think maintaining should be pretty straight forward: continue doing the same things, with just a little bit more food.

I have already celebrated with new clothes, and it's so nice to be able to find things that fit and flatter. There have been a lot of happy discoveries along the way, and I am beginning to feel like I have some real control over some of the overeating problems I've had in the past. It is a real mind game. I found, a huge surprise to me, that I LOVE to go running. I have discovered that just because a recipe is lean does not mean that it doesn't taste good.  I have discovered that even the best donuts taste kind of greasy and nasty, and that a piece of fresh fruit in season, is a bliss I had never before fully appreciated.
 
I opened my mind to new ideas, and came out thinner and happier.
 
Now I need to have some pictures taken!

The apples are ripe, the air is crisp, the chickens are roosting, which
can mean only one thing...our annual apple squish party!

Next Sunday, October 12th
1pm-6pm.
1015 NE 72nd St, 98115

Rain or shine (in the event of heavy rain, we'll move operations to the
basement...)

Beer, food (hope you like eggs), and, of course, plenty of fresh apple juice will be
provided.

Please RSVP so we have an idea how many to expect.

My big thing today: I'm going clothes shopping, and am a bit nervous. I'm at that point where very little in my closet fits, and I don't have much for the cold weather. I've never been a very good clothes shopper, because growing up overweight it was never a pleasure like it was for other girls. Another problem that I have is that I slip into a zombie state when there is too much to choose from. I'm sure this derives from a stimulus-deprived environment growing up on the farm. (Of course, the upshot of that is that I am never bored.)

My friend Mary offered to come for moral support, give me feedback on what looks good, what is age appropriate, stylish or frumpy, and, in general, pull me out of the zombie state. Mary is the one of the women who got me interested in weight watchers. She lost 90#, but in the past few years has gained some back. She told me that we have switched roles: at first her success motivated me, and now my success is motivating her. It's not a comfortable place to be in, and I hope shopping isn't a hard experience for us.

After a whole year of getting clothing at clothing swaps, second hand stores, and consignment shops, I'm now at the size I’ll maintain at for awhile, so it is time to start building a new wardrobe. We'll see what stores I'm drawn to. I've always shopped at Edie Bauer and Macy's, and pretty dark, drab stuff at that, but maybe I'll branch out to Banana Republic, Club Monaco, H&M, Ann Taylor, or some little boutiques. I know it's just a beginning, and I need to get comfortable pulling things together.

I am really aiming at form-fitting clothes, which I am convinced are an integral part of maintenance. Any stores I should look for? (Downtown Seattle has most chains.)

Our girls laid their first eggs. We are so proud of them.

I just discovered Firefox's Adblock Plus ad-on. My life is now complete.

I love to run. Wow. Never thought I'd say that.

But really, it's great. I run outside, at Green Lake, and it's just nice getting fresh air, running on a gravel path, watching the seasons change, being in a place with other runners around (and cute babies, and dogs, and children, and all sorts of nice distractions...) It's ultimately quite meditative, which I've been craving lately.

I started the "couch to 5k" plan from coolrunning.com a few months ago, and was slow in starting...I think the first 4 weeks took me 9 weeks, but there was a vacation in there, too. But now I am in week 8 (of the 9 week plan), and really look forward to each run. I'm running well over 4k in one stretch easily, so although I was originally thinking that I would do a 5k race in late July, I'm thinking of trying earlier:

This one next Sunday along Lake Washington sounds particularly compelling:
http://www.shorerun.com/
 
Originally, I was going to wait and run the Seafair torchlight 5k race just after my birthday on the Alaska Way Viaduct:
 http://www.athleteslounge.com/events/event.php?eventid=1991

But he "bare buns fun run" through the woods at Tiger Mountain sounds good too:
http://www.fraternitysnoqualmie.com/BBFR.html
 
opinions? Should I sign up for this Sunday's race?

Our chickens are two weeks old now, chirp, chirp, chirping away. So far we just have them in under a heat lamp in the basement. Stop by and check them out.

They are growing rather quickly, so I need to finish the hen house soon. Our working girls will be giving us eggs in about 5 or 6 months. It's about time we got some productive pets.

I have now lost 37.2 pounds since joining Weight Watchers. (down over 40 from my peak weight) So I guess it works. I've been losing fast enough to really feel the difference, but slowly enough to feel comfortable and not have any weird saggy skin. I want to lose another 37, but I think these pounds will come off much more slowly.

I've posted all the sundry details on this site: www.freewebs.com/ivanarama

I've been feeling down for the past couple days...unmotivated, lazy, bored,
inept at work, just simply...sluggish and lackluster. It took some harsh
mental control to get my ass into work yesterday--sadly, my reasoning was
that if I stayed home, I'd be even more bored, lazy, and languishing.

I just feel like I have no interest or imagination, and no willingness to
work. I feel guilty that I'm ignoring all my clients, whether or not that is
indeed the case, and too scared to do any work to get myself out of these
holes. It's probably not so bad as all that, but it's the same guilt and
fright that I struggled with all through college (which took me a decade to
get through). I think I need some kind of challenge, but any challenge at
work just seems to scare me. Why am I so timid?

I wore a new dress today, in the hope that I could be a different person.
Maybe if I convince myself enough that I am, I'd be able to see out of the rut.
It's this pretty green, tailored lightweight wool thing from the 1940's. Yeah, it is
still a half size too small. I got it a month ago so I'd have some pretty thing hanging
in my closet to motivate me. How silly and shallow of me to need something like
a dress to cheer me up.

Sorry for this pathetic confessional. Really, things are going, on the
surface, quite well in my world. I just get these lows, and they all point to
the same disappointment in myself.

I feel like a spoiled child that just can't quite handle the real world.

I discovered something remarkable last weekend. Yoga is easier with myopia.
Damn glasses kept slipping off in a very crowded class, so I finally took
them off. What an improvement! No distractions! No tension and worry about
bumping into others! I could really focus on my breathing. I felt like I had
some super ability that others just don't have.

It reminded me of years ago, when I could prevent little panic attacks simply by taking the glasses off. I suspect that this disadvantage to
Laser eye surgery is not commonly acknowledged.

The cardio room was packed but the weight room empty, but for a few *women*. I might consider Sunday a good gym day in the future, what with the crappy weather and all.

The gym is getting better for me, and this is a BIG DEAL. Really. Here's a little background:

I am not one for nightmares--only a few times have I awoken from dreams. However, I tend to get the same bad dreams. One of my recurring bad dreams is that the state of Iowa discovers that I did not take a full 4 years of P.E., in fact, I only took one semester before I figured out how to get out of it . This means that I did not earn my high school diploma, and it follows that(insert dream logic here)every single achievement I have had since then--college diploma, professional licensure, even my LEED certification and job, are null and void until I complete those 3.5 years of high school P.E. So I move back to Iowa to live with Mom, and am stuck going to school again to do P.E. Everyone is so much younger that me, and I serve as the school's "reason to get all your requirements when you should". I miss Mike and Rod terribly, as well as everything in my life in Seattle. This is not all so far-fetched. I spent my senior year as an exchange student, graduated in Germany (at least completing at the Realschule), and had to take another year of high school in order to graduate in the state of Iowa. I could have taken a GED, but I was too proud for that. After a year in a completely other world, there I was in this tiny little small-minded place, stuck for another year before university.

I hated P.E. as soon as they introduced competitive sports in 4th grade. The little scooters, kid games, trampoline, bouncy balls, parachute...that was awesome. but once they put in serious "boy things" like basketball and football, I became a fervent physical activity athiest. Obviously, if you were into jock things like that, you were too stupid or vain to put your mind to any use. My best friend was badly asthmatic (she in fact died of an attack when she was 15), so we would eschew sports together. I continued to play on the trampoline at home for years, but mainly fled from activity like the plague, and here I am...fat, sports ignorant, and gym-phobic.

But then one day after a step aerobics class, when we were all on mats stretching, I was thinking, "wow. that was fun. I really want to do this again. I feel great!". Then I looked out at the room at the Y, this slightly worn 1950's gym room, will all the equipment in the corner and the fan humming, and it all looked so terribly familiar... I realized that I was making up for those 3 1/2 years of P.E. absence, and this was a *good* dream.

I haven't had the bad dream since.

An ancient version of Microsoft Word once decided that my name was misspelled, and suggest I might really prefer to be known as "inane bugle".

Well, world, here I am.

Mike is part of a burning man group that put together a huge party a couple weeks ago. As a wrap-up/thank you for all the organizers, they decided to have a post-thanksgiving potluck—essentially, bring your leftovers.

I had cooked a 5-course Thanksgiving dinner for 20 people, and since the days after Thanksgiving we were invited elsewhere, we had all these fantastic leftovers for this potluck. I was happy to finally have all of these foods out of the house, since they’ve been a great temptation for me that I thus far hadn’t fallen for. Also, I was looking forward to the party, since I had just taken my favorite skirt in 4 inches (!), was wearing a new sweater, and finally was starting to look like I was losing weight. I hadn’t been a size 16 in 8 years!

After a stressful day at work, we rushed home to gather everything together, heat it all up, and wrap it well for the 40 minute haul through a tangle of traffic to West Seattle. We show up at this community center, overloaded with heavy, hot burdens of the food we are bringing. We are unsure which room it’s in, so we start looking for signs. We follow one sign, which leads us down some corridor, down some steps, and then dead-ends. Then we see other signs, all of which lead in different directions. Then we see this guy taping the signs everywhere. At this point, we set down the food—it is so heavy, and we are frustrated. Mike asks the guy about the signs, and he just giggles. Now we are furious. All this work to put together a large amount of food for (to me, anyway) a group of strangers. Now I feel like an utter fool. I let him know that since he finds this all so funny, *he* will be brining in the rest of the food, since it is awfully heavy. He snickers, looks me up and down, and says, “well, if you’d eat right and exercise, you wouldn’t have these problems”, and goes back to putting up his signs.

I considered throwing the butternut squash soup in the crockpot at him, but I’d have to unwrap it first for full effect. So I just get angry that I did not have my bus pass on me, because everything within me was ready to leave that feast in the corridor of the community center, and hop on the next metro bus to get away from this awful place.

But Mike saw some reason, and got all the food into the room. I escaped into the kitchen, where I just threw back glass after glass of water to swallow the rage. I pretend to be calm, setting up the food, and try to figure out how I will be able to get through the potluck. I guess Mike had gone around removing his signs, because he goes up to him and confronts him about taking down all his signs. This guy might not be the world’s biggest prick, but since adulthood I have become adept at avoiding such people, so for me, anyway, he’d do.

The evening was okay. I tried so very hard to recover, but here it is, 15 hours later, and I’m still fuming. I am mostly shocked at my reaction…I am a 37 year old woman who has been overweight her whole life…you think I’d be tough enough to blow off a jerk like that, but apparently I can’t. Yesterday morning, I was on the top of the world, all pleased to be showing off my new size 16 self, but this morning on the way into work, I couldn’t help look at the strangers around me and wonder, do they all just see me as some lazy fat chick?

I am losing weight for myself. So I can lie in bed at night and feel these pelvic bones that I hadn’t felt in a long time. So I can walk up the 3 steep blocks from the lake and maintain a conversation with a colleague without embarrassingly huffing and puffing. So I can look at clothes at a vintage clothing store and have a chance at finding something that I could actually wear. So I can ride my bike to work without strain. So I can sit closer to my desk.

I’m not doing this for some antisocial stranger. But I would like to be out of the radar of those people entirely, and getting smaller will, to some extent, protect me a bit from them. I hope. I’m just tired of the embarrassment.

Warning: the following post, while not a paid endorsement of a boringly mainstream weight loss system, may be overly gushing for certain people. Reader discretion should be advised.

I have only been at this for three weeks, but I am convinced that Weight Watchers is the perfect plan for me. It seems to have so many of the elements of stuff I fall for:
1. They have this really good online interface to record all the food I eat, and all the exercise I get. Filling in all the little check boxes for each glass of water, each cup of produce, every serving of dairy, good oil, and multivitamin while staying under a certain number of “points” is a little game I play throughout the day.
2. The plan does not rely on buying and consuming crappy prepackaged food. I do not have to consume any artificial meal-replacement bars or shakes, nor do I have to subject myself to a dreary, undersized, watery frozen TV dinner. I never have to ingest Splenda or eggbeaters. Gack.
3. The other people in ww, online and in the meetings, love to talk recipes, and are very encouraging.
4. The meetings are kind of kooky, but effective. The leader actually gives out gold stars for responses. Where do these stars go? Well, as an award for attending the second meeting, you get your very own bookmark upon which to place these stars! It is so un-self consciously cheesy. I find myself totally drinking the kool-aid at these folding-chair-and-name-tag pep talks. I can blame my family for this one: My mother is a very religious regular church-goer, so I probably have a genetic predilection for fervently and consistently following a group of believers through some personal change.
I even go to the 7pm Wednesday meeting--the same time mom always went to church. (In fact, in the town I grew up in, no one scheduled things on Wednesday night because it was "church night".)
Our leader, however, is not churchy (this is Seattle, after all), but I think it would be soooo easy to be that way in a ww meeting. I am also a real sucker for the "personal story" the successful ww people tell. it reminds me, though, of all the "giving testimony" stuff from mom's church people. As my friend Julia told me, such stories can inspire, or at least shock, us. They can either satisfy a prurient obsession, or help us empathize, or some weird combination thereof.

So it is going well. Mike and Rod are very supportive. So are my colleagues. I am exercising portion control, eating more whole foods, more whole grains, trying out all sorts of recipes of food I like. I still get to go out for Sushi. I don’t have to subject myself to gelatinous non-fat dairy and I can eat real cheese, I just need to account for it. I’ve discovered a great site for logging my “lunch walks” from work, (http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1409318), and delight in seeing how far or how elevationally high I can walk. One lunch hour, I even made it out to Marsh Island in Lake Washington. I am getting more comfortable going to the Y. I found a yoga class I actually look forward to, and a step aerobics class that is a lot of fun. Yes, fun. This, coming from the girl who always *hated* P.E. And I am losing weight. In three weeks the total comes to 6.8 lbs. I am actually no longer “severely obese” on the BMI chart. I think this is totally a sustainable way for me to live. My world is expanding.

After pretty much steadily gaining 3 ½ pounds a year, I am done. I’ve almost always been fat, even as a kid. There was a brief window when I was a freshman in High School that I was borderline not overweight, but it has just been getting steadily worse since then.

Unlike a lot of women, I’ve never done the cyclical dieting thing. In fact, other than a brief moment as an exchange student 20 years ago, I’ve never really committed to do any kind of diet. I have always distrusted diets as faddish, delusional, impractical, or as the pious attention-seeking declarations of women who aren’t really fat anyway. I’ve seen women lose weight, gain it back, and suffering the depravation and angst and misery of being simply uncomfortable with one of the greatest joys in life: food. I’ve never mentally wanted to subject myself to such pain, yet all along I’ve watched with some psychological distance at what is happening to my own body. Some of the ugly history:

At 170 lbs, the inner-thigh chafing began, but then I discovered the magic of bike shorts. At 190 lbs, I saw the appearance of a belly-fold.
At 200 lbs, I saw that belly-fold grow around towards my back.
At 210 lbs, I could, for the first time, actually “feel” the inner tube I was wearing around my waist, and found the belly really got in the way of doing a lot of things I was used to doing.
And at 220 lbs, I dislocated my kneecap simply running down some steps. I began to be really worried about what carrying around all this fat was doing to my joints, and imagined decades of aches and pains, and limitations on my mobility.

I knew that I could never commit to a diet unless it was something I could keep up with, like, forever. So, sucking up my silly pride, I joined Weight Watchers. I’m sure there are lot of other modern sexy programs out there, but I’ve known some people I both admire and whom I see a bit of myself in loose weight, keep most of it off, and stay healthy with their program. In fact, that one little time in my life when I did lose weight was as an exchange student, when, after gaining over 7 kilos during culture shock, my host mother took me aside, worried, and told be about how she had followed the German Weight Watchers program, and kept off the 20 kilos she lost. She fed me good stuff, imparted the notion of balance and moderation, and I looked forward to the walks and bike rides. I lost the 7 kilos and more, and went back to the States healthier than ever.

So I am starting to change some of my attitudes about food and exercise, and I’m counting points. The online tools are pretty helpful, and geared well to me, with lots of recipes online and such. We’ll see how it goes. My starting weight is 214, and I’d like to eventually get down to 140 before I turn 40, in 33 months.