welcome to another edition of...

Do You Like How You Look?!?

[studio audience cheers]

Oh, god, not this shit again.  I was saying to my (virtual) weightlifting buddies the other day that I thought I'd lost some of the weight I'd put on over the summer just from being back to working out five or six days a week while tracking my food loosely on work days and mostly not tracking on weekends. And that if I lost a few more pounds that way, I wouldn't be complaining, but if I stayed where I am right now, I wouldn't be complaining either.  I really have no desire to be lean now and I certainly have no desire to go on a real diet.

And then I a.) actually weighed myself today and b.) tried to put on a pair of jeans I'd forgotten I had that I'd bought last spring when I made it down to 111 for that stoopid contest.  Oh hahahaha.  Ha.  It must be be self-delusion or something that I'd lost a few pounds because, no.

That made me feel temporarily all angsty, like maybe I should suck it up and commence weighing every morsel of food that goes in my mouth and start turning down free cookies.**  Luckily I came to my senses, which is why I'm semi-lying in my bed*** drinking a pumpkin beer**** while I type this.

Like that.

BUT I did make sure to be extra active today (yesterday, whatever). It was such a beautiful morning when I left work at 4:45 am that instead of heading to the gym, I took a four mile walk. Then later after I slept a (very) few hours, I did an errand, went to acupuncture, walked from there to the gym to lift, then walked back past a couple subway stops before getting on the train.  All that is to say that I had a total of 23540 steps on October 14. Which is 8.99 miles, apparently.  (What? I couldn't have walked another .01 mile? Goddamn.)  How do I know this? My new phablet told me. It's got some kind of free app that comes with it that counts my steps for me as long as the phone's, y'know, in my hand or in my pocket or in my bag.  I'm toying with getting a Fitbit since so many people I know have them now, but I'm not sure what it's gonna tell me that my phone doesn't. When I don't leave it sitting on a table, that is.

Anyway. I bet if I walked 9 miles everyday I'd fit into those jeans again. Without giving up beer. Though I'm not sure I wanna be 111 pounds.  All angsting aside, I'm pretty sure my middle aged face looks better with the extra poundage.  I dunno.  I wish I didn't care what my face or body looked like, considering it's all a downhill slide till death at this point, but vain people gon' vain.

Speaking of which, I was at the hairdresser last week, vainly getting my roots touched up, and another hairdresser and her 20-something client started discussing how women need to cut their hair short when they reach like 40. I felt like saying, "Oi! I'm sitting right here, bitches."  Instead I mildly said to my stylist, "I highly disagree with that."  She took my part. Which I'm sure is just good business practice, but whatever.  I was almost as offended at the conversation as I was at not being invited to go zip lining. Apparently I'm in some kind of easily-offended stage. Ahem. But maybe the hairdresser chick and her client *didn't think I was over 40* so that didn't know they were insulting me. Yeah. I'm sure that was it. (Oh, I kill myself.)

Finally, speaking of vanity and my new phone, I signed myself up for Instagram. But I haven't figured out how to use it.  I haven't actually figured out how to use the camera on my new phone yet either.  Shut up. I haven't really tried.  In any case, I am malevolent_andrea, just like on here. So if you use Instagram, follow me. Or what-the-fuck-ever it is, I don't know the lingo. (And get off my lawn.) Someday soon there will be pictures of my food and drinks and cat and hikes and the new clothes I buy and maybe douchey gym selfies.

You know you wanna see.

xoxo

**Both the night nurses on my unit and the people in the sleep lab next door always have food. Like, always.  Last week I was eating ice cream cake at 2 am because it was someone's birthday.  Monday I had a giant chocolate-dipped shortbread cookie left over from a sleep conference.  [A 390 calorie muthafucking cookie. I looked it up.]

***I'm not working tonight because I swapped a shift with a co-worker who wanted to be able to go see her kid's cheerleading comp on Saturday. See, I'm not totally heartless.

****I had a case of Wachusett Pumpcan last year, but this shiz is even better.  Dogfish Head, you are the best.

sad cat denouement and my new gym

Sad news first.

Remember me talking about my cat Eddie's awesome dieting success? Well. He kept losing weight despite my going back to feeding him all the treatz, then he stopped eating much of anything though still being sweet and cuddly as all get out (fooling me into thinking he was just fine), and then last weekend he started getting mopey, so I called the vet.  On first examination, it appeared he had some kind of liver problem--his gums were yellow (!) indicating jaundice.  Blood work, however, revealed his real problem was a severe anemia and the jaundice was due to his RBCs breaking down.  The working hypothesis was that he had a parasitic infection causing the anemia. This freaked me out because a.) it's basically what killed my old cat in 2010 (Evil Kitty, RIP) though hers was complicated by a preexisting heart condition and b.) Eddie's never gone outside a day in his life.

The vet talked me down off the ledge that there is NOT some kind of colony of killer ticks living in my basement, waiting to kill any animal I bring into this house, and that viruses are not gonna live free range on my surfaces for the two years in between cats. Etc. But they told me even if we started treating Eddie, he was very sick and had between a 30-50% chance of making it.  I chose to treat. I wasn't going to euthanize poor Eddie if he had a 50% chance of being fine. So they took him back to the vet hospital for IV fluids, IV antibiotics, steroids, and "hand feeding."  I think hand feeding is a code word for squirting food into his mouth with a syringe whether he liked it or not, but whatev.

This was on Wednesday. By Saturday morning, while he was peeing and pooping and keeping down what they fed him, he wasn't eating on his own and he was still very weak. They called for my permission to do more lab work.  Lab results were back this morning and his RBCs had fallen even lower and now his WBCs were affected as well. He wasn't responding to the antibiotics.  They gently suggested that it would be in Eddie's best interests to cease treatment.  They brought him back to my house so D and I could say goodbye and then put him to sleep.

I am very very sad. And no longer pimping out his miracle weight loss plan. Because the working hypothesis now is that it was due to blood cancer.  Or a parasite.  Lab test for that's still pending.

RIP, Eddie. You were an awesome cat and I'm glad we at least got to have you live with us for 2 1/2 years.


Now on to more blog-appropriate and more cheerful topics.

My new gym and my adventures there at 5 am!  I dunno if I mentioned it, but there are a metric fuckload of people working out at that ungodly hour. Which isn't ungodly for me, because that's like 6 pm in my world. But I think the majority of these people are just up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at 4 am, for which I should probably hate them.  Most of them are pretty polite, however. They put their plates away. They ask if you're using something before they barge in.  They even put the dumbbells back in numerical order.  The one huge lapse in manners I have observed occurred a couple Fridays ago.  My iPod was't charged and I wasn't wearing anything with pockets big enough to stick my humongous new phone (i.e. my "phablet") into, so I was without music.  I was thus treated to hearing two middle aged dudes discuss how women and teenagers shouldn't be lifting heavy weights because they're not, y'know, men.  But that's not the rude part. The rude part was when another gym buddy of theirs showed up and started inviting them and everyone else in the immediate area to go ziplining in western Mass this weekend. Except me.  I mean, I know I am the new kid on the block and not part of whatever 5 am clique they've got going on there, but this dude even went over to invite some woman on the elliptical that I've never seen him talk to before.  I felt like the only kid in second grade not to get a valentine. Or something.  I mean, don't *I* look like the kind of person who wants to go ziplining with a bunch of strangers??!???!??***  Hmmpphhh.

Other than this little episode, and the fact that this new gym only has squat racks with immovable safeties, not true power racks, plus no steps and risers, just fixed boxes, I have no complaints. I did originally think that they didn't have disinfectant for the benches/machines which kinda grossed me out. But then I figured out the little pop up boxes of what I thought were tissues scattered throughout the gym were in fact wet wipes. Duh. No wonder no one asks me to go ziplining.

xoxo

***I absolutely do not