This has been a difficult week.

Problems with the GirlChild.  I was trying to quit smoking (I made it 11 days before I had a setback-will try again next week).  I was very discouraged about my workouts and my foot injuries.

Friday morning I didn’t get in any hurry to get to work.  I had looked at my calendar and I didn’t have any appointments scheduled until the afternoon.   While I was brushing my teeth, I got a call from my office.  I had a client there for an appointment that was suppose to start 15 minutes earlier.

I remembered talking to this woman.  I remembered making her an appointment.  I remembered writing it in my book.  But it wasn’t there.  In any event, I hauled ass to work, apologized profusely when I got there and she hired me.

Yesterday afternoon, while looking at my calendar to see what next week looks like, I notice that particular  woman’s appointment for NEXT Friday.  I’m still not sure if I wrote it on the wrong date (I almost always say, “I’ve got you down for May 12, 20010 at 10:30 a.m.”), or if she showed up a week early.  In either event, it made me feel better because I thought my memory was leaving me completely.

I am going to be 50 soon.  ”Soon” being a relative term meaning in 2 and 1/2 more years or 32 months to be more precise.

I need to do something big.  I’ve not yet figured out what that will be yet.

I’m thinking I need to run a marathon.

There are two things standing between me and that goal;  my two feet.

I broke my toe about 2 1/2 years ago.  I was just walking through my living room.  Barefooted.  And I caught one of the overstuffed chairs with my foot.  This was the result:

I think I told you about that fiasco.   I went to the doctor like three months after it happened for my annual exam.  She looked at it and told me to get an x-ray.  The x-ray showed it was broken.  She told me to go to an orthopedic.  I said, “Is there really anything an orthopedic can do for a broken toe besides what I’m already doing?”  Yes I needed to go.  I made a 7:45 appointment.  I had to be in Court at 9:30 that day.  I got there.  They took x-rays and then plopped me in a room.  Where I waited.  And I listened to the orthopedic yuck it up about his recent ski trip with the other orthopedics there  and talk to his nurse about her various problems and flirt with the drug rep.  Finally, a little after 9:00 when I said, “I have to be in Court so I’m leaving now” the orthopedic wanted to talk about my toe.  And he told me to do what I’d been doing; taping it up.  GAH!  Anyway.  That mess took six or eight months to stop hurting.  And sometimes it is still sore.

And then I got that awful Plantar fasciitis.   That is still present.  It never seems to go away.  It gets better.  Then it will flare up and hurt again.  I don’t think it’s every completely stopped hurting since I first got it last August.

Last week at the expo for the Marathon,  I got a sample of a product called BioFreeze.  And after I returned home from the race, when I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to walk down my stairs to go into the kitchen my foot hurt so bad, I got that bad-boy out of my bag and slapped it on my foot.  It reminds me of IcyHot without the hot burning aspect of IcyHot.

I trolled around the internet and sent my husband out to buy me some.  I picked the roll-on version.  I’m not crazy about having that smelly stuff on my hands.   And the other night before I went to the health club, I rolled some on my foot.  It didn’t stop my foot from hurting when I was actually running/walking.  But it did seem like it didn’t hurt as much the rest of the evening.  So that’s improvement, right?

I also haven’t had a cigarette since last Sunday.  It’s making me fuzzy, out of sorts, disoriented.  I can’t tell that my breathing has improved.  I’m assuming that it will though.

I’ve also started interval training.  Run 3 minutes walk 2 minutes for 45 minutes.

So.  If I can quit smoking.  Get my foot injuries under control.  And loss weight.  Maybe I’ll run a Marathon before I’m 50.

Anyone want in with me?

Good lord I am TIRED!

Today I participated in a 5K race.   I walked it.  I didn’t make particularly good time.  My Personal Trainer did the MARATHON in 3 hours and 46 minutes and I did 3.2 miles in about an hour.

I was going to meet up with a friend who was also doing it, but there were so MANY people there we couldn’t figure out how to meet.

It was interesting walking by myself.  Overhearing the conversations.  The Thunder beat the Lakers last night; it was a big topic of conversation.

I got up at 5:30 a.m. to do this.  I can’t remember the last time I was up that early.  It is 8:00 p.m. and I’m ready for bed.

The BoyChild and the Husband walked the kid’s marathon.  In the month or so before the marathon the BoyChild has walked or rode on his bike 25 miles and they did the last 1.2 miles at the Marathon.

Good lord I’m tired!  And my feet hurt.  And I’ve learned some important life lessons:  ibuprofen and ice are my friends.

O.K. Internets. Tell me. When do YOU exercise??

I started working out in February with my personal trainer (egads you have no idea how much it makes me cringe to say that-I need to find a better word to describe her).

I’ve been doing weight work on the machines. Oh every once in awhile she’d have me do something else obnoxious but it’s mostly been working on the machines.  On Wednesday morning, she decided to shake it up a bit and I did weight work with free weights. Good lord, I wasn’t sure she wasn’t trying to kill me. I’d been doing this 2-3 times a week for 7 or eight weeks and on Wednesday I felt like I’d been run over by a truck by the time I finished. That was very discouraging.

But that’s not my problem today. My problem is: When do you find time to exercise?

I meet with my personal trainer at 8:00 a.m. three mornings a week. She has to be at work at 5:30 a.m., so she doesn’t work very late in the day. 8:00 a.m. is about as early as I can stomach getting dressed and exercising and about as late as I can do it and get to work at a reasonable time.

In addition to my weight training, I have been doing the Couch Potato to 5K Running Program.  Currently I’m on Week 6.  I did Week 5 two days in a row.  It was hard.  I didn’t feel good several days during the first week and couldn’t do all the running.   I try to do that 3 to 4 times a week.

I had been going to the health club after the BoyChild goes to bed. Since we’ve been letting him stay up until 8:30 on school nights, it was having me get there pretty close to 9:00. And while my plan only calls for 30 minutes on the treadmill, some nights by 9:00 p.m. I am just flat out tired.

Thirty minutes of exercise doesn’t sound like a huge time committment but by the time I change clothes, drive to the club, do my workout and drive home, it kills an hour easily and an hour and fifteen minutes to an hour and a half regularly.

So, I’ve been trying to find a better time to work out than 9 o’clock at night.

I hate mornings.  But I have been going at 8:00 a.m. 3 times a week.  So I suppose I could go the other mornings at 8:00.  But then there’s the problem when I have to be in Court at 9:00 or even worse when I’m on an 8:15 docket.

Evenings worked o.k. but then there were those nights when I didn’t go because by the time the BoyChild went down, I was exhausted.

After work seems like a good time.  Leave from the office.  Change at the health club.  Work out.  Head home.  In theory, it sounds good but the reality just doesn’t always play out that way.  Often I’m hungry at the end of the day and really need to eat before I do anything else.  If David has been busy doing other things, then we don’t even start dinner until I get home then there isn’t time to do anything else before the BoyChild has to start getting ready to go to bed.  Which sort of defeats the purpose of leaving my office right at 5:00 to be able to spend as much time with the BoyChild.

I keep coming back to first thing in the morning.  But man I hate getting up in the mornings and immediately having to leave to  go somewhere and sweat like a pig.

I guess if it were something I liked to do, this wouldn’t be so hard.  But honest to goodness with a cherry on top, I hate exercising.  I just can’t reach a point where I actually like doing it.  I read about these people who can’t wait to get to their workout.  Who actually look forward to exercising instead of dreading it with ever fiber of their being.    I guess then I’d be more able to fit it in my schedule.

So?  Anyone have any words of wisdom for me?  Anyway I can learn to love to exercise?  Or at least make it not so painful?

Last weekend was Easter.

As part of our Easter celebration, I went to the bank and got crisp dollar bills and presidential dollars to go in the kids’ Easter baskets.

Before we went to Easter Vigil at church, the BoyChild stuffed my purse full of cars, Nintendo games and other detritus he  couldn’t live with out during the three plus hour service.

In the midst of loading and unloading my purse, the BoyChild discovered my stash of presidential dollars.  He knew what they were for.  He wanted one desperately.

When it was time to make the offering, he asked if he could have one to give to the Church.

I gave him one, as well as one for his sister and her friend.

Later, when we were talking about it, his explanation was, “when you have enough, you should give to people who don’t have enough.”

A simple concept.  One more people should heed.  Heartbreakingly sweet.

The weather is tormenting my husband.

It has been freaky here.  We had a mini-blizzard the 20th.

I’d taken my winter coat to the dry cleaners to be cleaned before putting it away.  I had to break that baby out again.

And then, within the next couple of days, we turned the AC on!

My husband prides himself on how long he can wait before turning the AC on.  While I don’t think we’ve ever gone as late as June, we have gone into May before turning it on.  David would be so smug, with our windows open, listening to all the units hum around the neighborhood, that HE didn’t turn his AC on.

But the weather has gotten him this year.  I let him blame it on me cause I hate being hot.

This was the view from my front door looking out Saturday morning:

That’s not a picture I took in black and white.  It was just gray.

This is from the top of the stairs looking at my front door:

I really have had enough of this bad weather.

Today is the official first day of Spring.  It feels like deep winter.

Maybe next weekend we can begin working in our yard again and I can regal you with pictures of my beautiful garden.

Fifteen or so years ago, I had a subscription to a magazine called Taste of Home.  David and I were still, relatively, newly married and in one of the magazines,  I found a recipe for a casserole called “Baked Spaghetti.”  This was back when I had time and energy for cooking and reading magazines. A time when I could easily eat fattening, yummy comfort foods with abandon and read cooking magazines unmolested by demands to play Bakugan or Legos or Super Mario Brothers on the Wii.

Like many recipes I wanted to try, I tore it out of the magazine. It’s ragged edges were turned under, so only the recipe was exposed. About the size of a 3×5 inch card, it has been in my recipe box this whole time making an appearance on our menu at least once a month ever since.

I remembered it had 28 ounce can of tomatoes, ground beef, a pound of spaghetti, cream of mushroom soup, black olives and lots of cheese.  There were other things in it, but I could not recall what they were, or the amounts.

A couple of months ago we were going to have it.  David pulled the recipe to make his grocery list.  That was the last anyone saw it.   We tried to recall the recipe from memory by looking at the pantry.  That was simply too hard to pick out the ingredients among our cans of stewed tomatoes, rotel, diced tomatoes, black olives, mushrooms and pasta.

As silly as it sounds, I mourned the loss of that recipe.  Not just the cheesy, delicious, goodness of the meal itself,  but the shiny magazine page, the picture, the stains from years of use.  Since we lost it, I’ve trolled around A Taste of Home‘s web page hoping to find it.  They have a nice search engine.  I’ve tried several permutations of “Baked Spaghetti” and looked at dozens of casseroles with the same name.

Today, while I was eating my lunch I idly run another search.   I found it!  Because it made me so happy, and we are going to have it for dinner tomorrow night, I wanted to share it with you.

Baked Spaghetti by Taste of Home
12 Servings Prep: 20 min. Bake: 30 min.

Ingredients

• 1 cup chopped onion
• 1 cup chopped green pepper
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 can (28 ounces) diced tomatoes, undrained
• 1 can (4 ounces) mushroom stems and pieces, drained
• 1 can (2-1/4 ounces) sliced ripe olives, drained
• 2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 1 pound ground beef, browned and drained, optional
• 12 ounces spaghetti, cooked and drained
• 2 cups (8 ounces) shredded cheddar cheese
• 1 can (10-3/4 ounces) condensed cream of mushroom soup, undiluted
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Directions

• In a large skillet, saute onion and green pepper in butter until tender. Add the tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, oregano. Add ground beef if desired. Simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes.
• Place half of the spaghetti in a greased 13-in. x 9-in. baking dish. Top with half of the vegetable mixture. Sprinkle with 1 cup of cheddar cheese. Repeat layers. Mix the soup and water until smooth; pour over casserole. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Bake, uncovered, at 350° for 30-35 minutes or until heated through. Yield: 12 servings.

I was much more enthusiastic about this:

when I thought it was INSIDE the Bass Pro Shop.

He ultimately caught this:

but then we were faced with what to do with it.

He didn’t want to throw it back.

I offered to cook it, if his Father would clean it, but he didn’t want to do that.

I didn’t want him putting it in a box and storing it under his bed.

We compromised by agreeing to bury it in the flower bed to fertilize the flowers that will be coming up this spring.

We promised to do more fishing this summer, but I think we really need to come up with a better plan than burying them in the front yard.

On Friday morning, I walked out of my front door and found a blanket of snow on my front lawn.  It almost made me cry.  Here it is, almost March, and we STILL have snow.

Yesterday, I went out, and found these in my front yard:

Crocus.  They are always the first flower to arrive in the spring.  They always give me hope that winter will end.

Soon.