Coming Up: Tracks and hearts skip a beat at equinoctitango... only five seconds? Are cardiac paddles required?? A harrowing journey through the bowels of Bellis Fair in search of the mythical Macy's Bridal Consultant hits snags and auto-parts. Will our feisty couple emerge unscathed? Will they managed to print a registry anywhere? Adella hits the juice big time in her battle for weight-supremacy, as Andrew loses a few. His days as heavy-weight are numbered. Adella tangles in non-tango with Nathan and nearly shimmies off that heavy coating of rust straight into somebody's eye. Andrew warms his grateful spouse's arms and strangely colored poultry crow! All leading up to the final departure and another morning weigh in. Or will it??
No monkeys were drowned in the making of this workday... yet -
I can only assume that my weather1 app was being a mite British when it described the minor tsunami outside as "light rain." Fortunately, I am still in possession of this analog weather app called "my five senses," so I was fairly aware that proper verbiage would tend more towards pouring than sprinkling. Unfortunately, all of my rain gear was upstairs at the office, so this knowledge was not particularly handy except for mental preparations. In the end, I decided that I would park in the metered area next to the door and just suit up and move the car to my actual parking spot (roughly two blocks further from the door) some time before parking enforcement wakes up.
Naturally, my office lightbulb rather dramatically phwuffed in a blazing baby nova when I turned it on this morning. Perhaps prematurely, I've got the SAD light out and on full blast. Yes, I do have replacement bulbs for the lamp, but hell, it's fall. The days are just going to get shorter and darker. Time to get into the light therapy habit ("light" in a literal sense and less of a "just a dash of talk therapy over drinks" kinda way).
Yesterday, Andrew and I were very brave (braver than any little toaster around) and attempted to purchase a gift off a bridal registry. Just for kicks! Because we were normaling (30 Rock reference courtesy of our other normaling activity of marathoning the hell out of that free netflix trial). No, really, a friend is getting married soon and she is registered at Macy's. Yes, there's an online registry, but I kept getting incensed that I'd have to pay a large percentage of the price of the gift to have it delivered. So off we went to a physical location.
You've heard of my prior adventures in shopping, so nothing I describe will likely be of any surprise. We did not end up purchasing a gift from the registry. I shall now be buying her a Macy's gift card (blessedly available in the far less terrifying Rite Aid gift card aisle). I will only need a smidgen of therapy to recover from the experience. But it's the journey that counts, not the destination, right? So let's wind back and see how we got there this time! This time, we started with the best of intentions at Macy's. Macy's is not where you go to purchase registry items. Oh no, Macy's Home Store is where you go for that little frolick. This is not the same place, but at least both are in the mall. Yes, the mall. We got to wander through the mall on a weekend morning. And not in the morning-morning where the silver sneakered mall rats are skuttering about. This is after the BC-bargain-hunters have stirred, had their fill at the Costco gas line, and are now ready to milk our crappy US economy for all its worth. Deep calming breaths...
So, there is a registry kiosk at the Macy's Home Store. It is, however, broken. A handy sign informed us of this and recommended that see a bridal consultant. Odd, since I am now a bride emeritus and don't suspect I need further consulting, but who am I to question the way of Macy's? Not seeing any one in appropriate flowing robes advertising their status as Bridal Consultant, we found a sales person instead. I'm not sure if she was a "bridal consultant" but she did seem willing to take us to another desk and computer area... and sit with us staring at another computer that didn't seem to be on the clock that morning. We waited for roughly fifteen minutes and/or two ice ages of awkward staring into space while Andrew and I chatted funny emoticons at each other with our covertly stashed cell phones before she went off to try some alternative solution (like leave). Andrew and I were getting a little tweaked out by all the Martha Stewart stemware (seriously, it was GLARING AT US!), so we pulled up the online registry and thanked our bridal consultant for all her efforts.
Of course nothing on the bridal registry was in the store. I don't know that for certain, since there were some four or five hundred dollar items I didn't check on, but things within our price range were certainly without our reach. Andrew, who does not like leaving tasks unaccomplished thought I might as well buy the gift card while I was there. I thought there were lines and that Macy's was starting to slowly infect my soul (we have five minutes and counting before I need an electric Versace melon baller!!). We left. I still need a card from Rite Aid anyways, so I don't feel that doing so has caused an extra trip on my part.
We did finish out the mall experience with some bottles of zinc pills, some kind of fruit infused water, and new wiper blades for Andrew's Pathfinder! Maybe we should just throw those in a leftover gift bag and call it a gift!! It is the thought that counts, right? And what's more romantic than "I hate shopping at the mall on a Sunday morning"?
And yes, even further back, I did manage to dj without a hitch on Saturday night. There were tweaks I might have done if I'd taken more time. I do like to mix up the cortinas. I have this very luscious track of Autumn Leaves, that I've used before. It's really apt, actually, for an alternative tanda. I like using it the month that fall begins for obvious reason. I was idly hoping to make cortinas of several different versions of Autumn Leaves. Perhaps next year.
And I might have figured out the exact amount of time needed between tracks. Some music skips straight from one end to the next abruptly. The effect of that pause or absence of pause isn't as noticeable when you are merely listening - something about the physical dance-trance that can make those final silent seconds truculently tangible. It's worst when there is no pause: jarring. But it's a bit strange when the pause lingers long enough that you start to question whether the next song will come. I had just thrown in a 5 second silent mp3 between my songs. Not always needed last night. Ah well.
It was a small but loyal crowd. Not a huge handful of regulars, but those who came enjoyed the music (pretty alternative-heavy by prior request). There's a special joy that comes from dj-ing, in that you get to watch your favorite music gain myriad layers of texture with each dancer's embodiment. Even hearing your songs on a larger stereo system is a revelation, but hearing it synesthetically and feeling the instrumentation of dancer's bodies counter-point the bass and treble of the recording is an absolute expedition. Also, of course, you can handpick tandas and leads for your own dancing purposes.
So yes, terrifying but satisfying weekend quite light on the supposed deluge we were expecting. Apparently our Pacific autumnal bluster was fashionably late and deferred its appearance until Monday morning. But back to the present and that rain. It appears to have paused. Now, do I go ahead and move my car or procrastinate with this work nonsense for a spell longer (thus risking another outburst)? As if this is even a question...
Life on the Juice -
So... juice. Juice is interesting. I don't generally drink it, as you may have ascertained. I'm princess-and-pea-level sensitive to sugar, and have tended to prefer it buried in a decent amount of protein or other slow-digesting nutrients. As I've oft recounted, my first experience with inebriation - and my only experience with alcohol poisoning - was due to the unwitting consumption of several jello shots. Since they digest differently than straight alcohol and taste like candy, it kind of seemed like a little booze bomb detonated in my stomach at one point in the evening. One minute idling about in the middle of Senior Prank (now that's even more of a tangent than I'll go on, but let's just say it was a Saint John's thing), and the next ... I was living out an NYU film student's attempt to singularly destroy the artificial construct of plot and reach the greater truth that instead of writing the script that student had hung around in the dorm room getting totally wasted on something a little weirder than jello shots. And a little while after that... well.. let's just say ouch!
My point (buried deep in the darkest center of some peppy palaver) - the unadulterated sugar in things like juice (let's not even discuss added sugars) can kind of feel like little jello-shot bombs sometimes. One minute, I'm sipping something with a perky name. The next I'm back at NYU reinventing the art of cinema and nursing a bit of a sore stomach.
But drinking juice is also an incredible way to deliver unadulterated energy to my body. Kind of like mainlining energy, really. It's extremely convenient and portable, bypasses a lot of the usual border patrol red tape that actual food encounters, and is a hell of a lot less messy as an ongoing calorie drip when I'm at my treadmill desk.
My nutritionist was also a fan of juice, although she suggested diluting it. I need the juice most when I'm at work and constantly moving. Since the office fridge is lilliputian, I've decided to buy pure juice in concentrate form from the local hippy grocers conveniently located across the street. I drink soda water frequently enough that I suspect my interiors are all appropriately eroded, (I've got a Soda Stream and I'm not afraid to use it!!... ok, I'm a little afraid to use it... it makes kind of a loud noise), so I've been adding a small bit of fruit juice concentrate to seltzer and drinking through the morning. It takes me about three to four glasses of seltzer and a little extra water to get through a single serving., but it is as refreshing as all those soda commercial make soda seem.
So, perhaps there are other factors afoot, but boy was I energetic yesterday after drinking glass number two. It wasn't the coffee, let me tell ya. I felt like my eyes were in a state of perma-agog anime width. And sitting through our office meeting made me a little twitchy. I virtually leapt at the treadmill when lunch was over and was engaged in quite the energetic staring contest with the computer monitor ahead of me. I'm thinking, I might have gotten a little teeny eensy bit of a sugar buzz. Which is pretty nuts, because this is not a lot of fruit juice in the grand scheme of things. I'm now trying to imagine what might happen if I drank I full serving at once instead of diluted in several sodas. Or, hell, just chugged the concentrate syrup.
But then, perhaps I'm blaming "the juice" unfairly. I did feel a lot more energetic during my run before and have found myself much less tired at the end of the. It could be - knock on wood - that my body is starting to get accustomed to having extra energy to spare. Maybe it's regained some faith that there will be more calories in the future and that it's ok to go ahead and free up more energy supplies for immediate availability. Maybe the whole world is in a lot of trouble - particularly +Andrew Wright - and the twitchy little morning tamarin version of Adella is branching out into the uncharted waters of the post meridian. Maybe if I keep eating this much, my sweet spouse will find me leaping from kitchen appliance to cabinet (and probably breaking them, since I will also hopefully have gotten some extra mass to temper all this energy). Oh boy!!
Alternately, my body is afraid of this extra energy consumption, doesn't know what the hell to do with it and wants nothing to do with it. I've also noticed this kind of recursive cycle in which I eat more, which makes me want to move more so I can eat more so I can move more... I'm not sure which is the chicken or which is the egg, but we're a big batch of huevos rancheros hereabouts.
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| not actually huevos rancheros, but even tastier if you bake the bananas a little |
Yesterday I found an extra fabulous energy burn returning to my previously suspended private lessons with Nate. I fell off the dance lesson wagon after the wedding. You know how it goes (just nod and pretend you do, that was a rhetorical intro anyways): you're a little busy with some major life change, so you suspend something while you take care of things, then you're not as busy but you're out of the habit, and pretty soon it's been months and your body has forgotten how to do things that you spent a good while learning and you're dreading that inevitable moment where you must fly face first into your newly acquired limitations...
And the last time I scheduled a lesson with Nate, my grandma up and died on the morning of the lesson. So I was a little concerned what might happen to my other relatives if I tried again. Seems like all are still accounted for, and I thoroughly shook off a fair bit of rust from my torso. I was stiff (for me). I always tell people in tango that the movement/follow comes from the upper body, which then settles into the lower body. But when I'm out of practice or too in my head, I kind of want to skip the upper body, and that heady treacle of rebounding momentum, and just put my feet where I think they should be. And Nate particularly likes a pretty heavy follow (heavy in a gooey compression and release kind of way, not heavy like a brick wall kind of way). Took some work to loosen up again, but shockingly my east swing was pretty comfortable. And my cha-cha didn't end in blood shed.
By the time the lesson was over, any juice still mucking about in my system was decidedly waving a white flag. After sticking around a spell to see my old lesson buddy, Karen (we had back to back lessons for several months over these few years), I was pretty ready to call myself crashed. I did continue to eat through the evening, but didn't quite get that same buzz as earlier.
Regardless of root cause, I'm blaming "the juice" a little because I definitely felt like a child on a sugar high yesterday, and maybe shades of Buster Bluth at times: I'm a monster!!!!! Kind of an impish juice monster, though. I'm still not daring enough to try straight unadulterated juice in the evening time, but we shall see. Andrew is warned that there may be cabinet leaping in the near future!
Avanti Fan GRRRRL gets her arms warmed -
Finally, I have arm warmers! Blue Rooster is the eponymous sponsor of +Andrew Wright's cycling team, except that it's also called Avanti. I'm not really sure what it is officially, but Blue Rooster is cuter. Whatever form of poultry, the team consists of a pretty chill group of insane bike fanatics with heterogeneous tastes in cycling styles, and questionable choices in team colors (white jerseys for a sport that revels in mud, dust and sweat?? Really??).
Of course the true advantage to being on a team is that warmth and camaraderie that comes from aligning with your true saddle-mates (finally, somebody who really WANTS to talk about my drive train and that small section of a mountain trail fifty miles away that I can't quite master!!!) . But there are some economic perks as well, if you like the team sponsors. There are quarterly "team orders" that go around, from which team players can order discounted items of everything from bike parts to post-cycling skirts. This team order, of course, was all about accessories. Andrew got some arm warmers and some leg warmers to go with his knee warmers and shoe covers. Yes, yes, this is part of his plan to race in the nude except for a helmet, shoes and the aforementioned warmers. He's stylish like that. He got me some warmers too! I will not be spectating in nothing but arm warmers though. It gets cold out there!
But these aren't just bling for me to show my groupie girl support at those mid-season races that don't quite call for a coat. Oh no, these are for running! I've been cadging on about my poor cold hands and wrists for months now, despite the fact that it's been warm enough for the rest of me to happily don a sports bra and call it good. I exaggerate a bit, but my torso warms up fairly well on a run, while I rarely manage to work my hands and wrists into some state beyond clammy-undead.
I like to end our runs by touching the back of my hand to Andrew's steaming saline sea of a neck. Ok, I like doing that almost anytime, because he makes a cute noise when that freeze hits human flesh. My ice-hands cometh!! But I do particularly enjoy demonstrating this after a long sweaty run in which I am otherwise warmed up to a minor boil. Reynaud's, yes, but a minor one that mostly enables me to scare people with gelid squeezes and off-color fingers.
Hearing my cries (or sick of hearing his own), Andrew put in his team order mid-summer and added me to the mix, because he's sweet like that. We were a little uncertain about sizing, since the manufacturer is Italian and Italian cyclists are quite miniature compared to their American counterparts (think regular poodle to standard poodle) and sizing is not particularly easy to gauge On the other hand, they were made in men's sizes. Luckily, so far the extra-small is working out just fine and I haven't lost circulation anywhere. All fingers are flesh toned! Shocking!
Yes, I'm wearing them at the office. I refuse to close the window or turn off the fan because I know how stuffy it's going to get at about 10 a.m., and like to be able to breathe during my mornings. They are a nice compromise for a body that stores heat just fine in its torso, but phones it in for the appendages. My fingers are still cold, but there's not much to be done about that short of getting a much larger sized keyboard and wearing gloves at all times.
Speaking of sporting pursuits, I went to the gym with Azita yesterday (no arm warmers yet drat!). I have running shoes (nice ones, in fact) at the office, of course. Since we rarely end up using the treadmills for our warm up, and the elliptical machines really don't need special anything, I didn't wear them. I didn't quite have the proper tools to cow my coif into submission (nothing short of several barrets, a head band, an elastic AND a hair clip can do that halfway). But Azita wanted to use them yesterday.
It was a bit of flippety flop experience, with my hair whirling about my head, but altogether I was quite impressed that my hair managed to stay somewhat subdued. Sure, my bangs enmeshed themselves permanently into my forehead and have intermarried with my eyebrows. But the single hair clip held fast and did not get expelled across the gym into somebody else's eyes, so I call it a win.
Self-five.
Perhaps it's time to take the new running shoes from the office and swap them out for the worn in ones at home. I haven't quite gotten the new ones broken in, but blister season is waning and I'm ready to pair my new arm warmers with some new shoes and be darned spiffy on the trails, baby!
COOKADOODLE-BLUE!
Weight for it... weight for it...
I did not weigh myself this morning. I'd thought about it. I really had. You know that song lyric about leavin' on a midnight train to Georgia? Well, in the spirit of hopping late night transportation to destinations a wee bit south of the Mason Dixon line, Andrew and I are putting our own spin on such things by leaving on a 10:30 p.m. plane to Maryland. This is largely a sign of our enduring love for Gladys and her pips, but also to attend (finally) The Saint John's College Homecoming - 10 Year Reunion Edition (nevermind that I technically dropped out twelve years ago and thus am off the nice round schedule).
It's exciting and all, but it throws orange 3D printed monkey wrenches into some of our regular routines. Like, maybe I haven't bought any perishable goods all week and have been anxiously using up any and all remaining dregs of dairy products and ripening fruits. Getting quite creative on my final day, trust me. I'm not entirely sure what we're going to eat when we return, as the fridge is back down to beer, wine and coffee at this point (I think I just answered my own question) and I suspect that I may be too tired to attempt grocery shopping on a Monday midnight. It also means that during my allotted day for weekly weigh-ins, I will be a fair distance from my new-fangled scale. Since the point of weigh-ins is largely to track trends under consistent conditions, attempting to find a replacement back East would be meaningless.
So I did consider trying out an early weigh-in, just for kicks. Just to have something to report. Just to stand in the living room half-naked holding a paddle out in front of me before my morning coffee. Just to see what happens after a week of eating an average of 3,400 calories a day (how am I not seriously full anymore? It's kind of amazing how my body's adjusted to this after some dietary tweaks)
But, despite all the glittering temptations strewn in my path, I did not weigh myself. As before, it's a weird combination of conflicting emotional anxieties when I try to track progress that is at once both tediously slow and surprisingly quick depending on my mindset. Mostly, I didn't weigh myself because it's been less than a week and I'd rather put more space than less between weigh-ins to see more progress.
I also might be gaming it a little. I noticed this morning that my throat was a little dry and my waist was quite taut. A word about my waist (really it deserves its own tome of encomiums and odes, but for now brevity will suffice in lieu of poetry and wit): my waist is routinely the most reliable indicator of how much water I am retaining (or not) on a given day. It varies in measurement by about an inch from fullest to most sere. And today, it was corsetted. So I think it's dry out and maybe I have a cold, so I am likely to be dehydrated. That might have been reflected in the body fat percentage reading, although in the past two goes, I don't think it varied as much as my weight. It probably would have detracted from numerical gains. And I don't need the de-motivation.
I really don't need the de-motivation right before a trip. Just as travelling is historically a dieter's undoing, travelling for me has always led to backsliding in weight gain. On the one hand, I'm less likely to be moving around quite as much. On the other hand, that very fact causes my appetite to tank. And, of course, I don't have access to my own kitchen, am easily distracted from eating sufficiently when I'm not going along with a general routine, and since I don't do large square meals three times a day (more like several cubicle meals all day long), it's hard for social meals associated with travelling to make up the difference. I've gotten more expanded into eating larger portions at a time. With denser foods, I have managed to stomach meals of a staggering 500-600 calories at one sitting (more if I add juice as an afterthought), but I am still totally out of practice.
Anyways, Andrew went ahead and weighed himself despite my abstention. Either he's lost four pounds in less than a week (hey this is a competition now to see who will reign supreme in the weight-category and I control several of his meals! It could happen if I were so willing to play dirty), or his results confirm my initial hesitancy about stepping on the scale this morning. And/or it confirms that when we eat out - as we are wont to do on weekend nights - he probably retains a bit more water than when we eat in, and I'd guess that's a mix of portion and sodium content. Nonetheless, I'll take it as a sign that I am moving up and he's moving down and soon the torch shall be passed... in about 15 pounds from each direction.
In the meantime, I continue to be boggled that I can eat so much! It's kind of a revelation. I'd always sort of assumed that the best read of how many calories a person needed could only really be determined by measuring what caloric intake they had to maintain a certain weight. And my weight was holding steady last year at an intake of about 2400. In theory it makes sense that I would add 1000 calories to this to gain the ideal 2 pounds a week (well a little more, since the surplus of 6,000 would hit at 6 days instead of 7). What amazes me is that my weight held more or less steady the year before I bumped that up when I was eating significantly less, and more in the range of 1800, while maintaining a similar to more vigorously active lifestyle. Which I guess confirms that there's a certain point at which the body will start its own sequester process on functioning instead of auctioning off that last teeny percentage of fat and muscle. Just pretty staggering to compare. How on earth did I do it? Was there fatigue and other symptoms that I was writing off as the stress of being a new lawyer? Must have been!
Anyways, aside from packing my luggage 80% full of extra snacks, I am turning my brain from my endlessly fascinating diet (nod and smile, here folks) to my travels. I am so excited and not yet nervous to go back to Annapolis. As I drift ever-further from the official homecoming program, I am scheduling one day each with my two closest and most enduring Johnnie friends: Stephanie, who bridged life eras with me across time and New England, and who put up with me at my most emotionally messy; and James, who was my first real boyfriend and carries the title of ex-evolved-to-friend in addition to "funniest pairing" ( I am about 8 inches taller than him and usually wore 3 inch heels when we were dating).
I'm nearly packed and think I have travel arrangements set up. Now to actually find that not-quite-midnight not-quite-train to not-quite-Georgia and hop on it!
I'll remember to order the juice when the flight attendant walks by...
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