30 minutes of perspective three times a week

I just finished my first workout for Week Two of the Couch to 5K program and contrary to what I would have thought, I did not fall over dead at Mile 2. I highly recommend making a new route each week to help mark the time passing and keep the workouts fresh. Breathing has been my biggest challenge so far. My legs and joints all feel great, but my right lung always feels like it's about to collapse about halfway through. In previous running experiments I would have just quit or turned it into a fast paced walk for forever. But since Robert keeps pushing me onward and telling me how great I'm doing I'm having to come up with alternate coping skills.

I'm breathing deeper, paying attention to my posture and as hokey as it sounds trying to stay positive about the whole thing. I'm pleased to say on my run today I didn't want to perform an emergency lung-ectomy right there on the sidewalk.

I was chatting with Megan about this whole running lark of mine and she said it was too boring for her liking. We also commiserated on how the emptiness of running would leave the door open for 30 minutes of fretting about all the things we should be doing besides running. Amazingly, though, that hasn't been happening for me this time. I spend most of my energy focused on the run itself. While I'm running I'm listening to my body (and that damn right lung) and when I'm walking I am planning for the next run. The biggest distraction I had this morning was when a chihuahua tried to chase me for a bit, but I think I had him beat in strides.

As I work on my five minute cool down walk, I'm amazed each time at just how refreshing the whole run has been. My mind feels much more clear, I feel less stressed and spending 30 minutes expending all my energy on breathing and moving helps me keep the rest of the day in perspective.

I'm becoming one of them

I am in the throes of a fascinating conversation with Kim and Jack in our living room about blogging and social circles and I have a thousand ideas all whirling around in my head, but time is running short so I wanted to at least touch base before the end of the day. I put up Christmas lights on our front porch this afternoon. We even went to two Home Depot stores so I could get enough lights (here's a tip: always buy twice the number of lights you think you'll need). I can remember years past where we were I was constantly stressing about all kinds of things and Christmas seemed a million miles away. But all of a sudden I'm one of those people out there on the day after Thanksgiving stringing up lights. Who would have thought?

Just yesterday morning, I was telling Rich I couldn't understand those people who have finished all their Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. What do they do all Christmas season? Talk smugly about how they've already finished their shopping to stress me out for the next 26 days? We then arrived at his parents' house and at some point his mother proudly proclaimed that she had finished all her shopping and I said, "We were just talking about you this morning! That's great!"

So no, I'm not one of those people but I'm definitely more squared away than I have been in the past. It feels pretty good to be able to spare a few moments today and revel in "the holiday spirit" (whether that holiday is Hallowsgivingmas of this last quarter of the year or only Christmas). I hope you all are having a festive season!

A near perfect holiday

This has to be one of our best Thanksgiving dinners yet. Every year we squeeze two dinners into one day. Rich's family lives an hour and a half away in Richmond so we have dinner #1 around 2pm and then head back home for dinner #2 at our house where my family has taken over our kitchen for us. All the guests have now gone home or gone to bed and I declare today a total success. It wasn't without excitement, though. My brother volunteered to take care of the turkey(s) this year as well as several other items. We had juice from a previous turkey this week to make the gravy ahead of time. All Perry needed to do for the big meal was show up with the turkey he had been cooking all afternoon. The plan was for dinner around 6pm but we were behind schedule a bit. By 6:15, Mom called Perry because we hadn't heard from him. The phone rang and rang but no answer. She tried again a few minutes later and Perry answered but said he had been asleep when she called the first time and had forgotten about the turkey.

When Perry did arrive with the turkey (he only live a few miles away) he was convinced the turkey was ruined. Mom and I said we thought it would be fine, but he just kept lamenting that it could have been better. We learned that part of his stress was how he had overslept and then woken up. Mom's first call woke him up but he didn't answer because his first thought was "oh, Mom's calling" and then "SHIT the TURKEY!". He sprinted to the kitchen where his very fancy remote turkey timer was beeping and wouldn't tell him the temperature but just kept flashing "OVERDONE". He scrambled to extract the bird and assess the situation, wondering just how bad it all was and all this super expensive timer could shriek at him was OVERDONE OVERDONE OVERDONE!

We think it was about 200 degrees but amazingly it turned out fine. We had tons of gravy and it was one of the smoothest run dinners overall that we've had in years. A big factor was that we are now in twice the house with twice the space to cook, eat, and package leftovers. It was a joy.

The only flaw in our plan was dessert. Since we were cramming two meals in one day we skipped dessert at dinner #1. And by the time we got to the dessert portion of dinner #2, we were all really full. My brother had also bought a sweet potato pie instead of a pumpkin pie, much to Rich's disappointment. Rich had foregone pumpkin pie at his parents' to come back here but had no pie. So I think at some point I'll be going out and buying him a pumpkin pie to have with his leftovers. And I think I'll be making desserts ahead of time for Christmas to make sure they're ready.