Monthly Archives: May 2005

had a good strong weekend moving michelle’s stuff to her new apartment and cleaning out or old one.

I am SO tired of lifting boxes!
but I feel totally strong and tough, and though I was sore yesterday imagine the horror if I hadn’t been working out at the gym!

it’s sad to leave our old beautiful apartment, but enough yuck has happened recently there (like, dog poop in the front entrance way, discovering a potentially hazardous mold colony in the basement, new holes in rotton floorboards) that I’m not seriously mourning having to move on.

PLUS, now michelle and I both have new apartments, the better to explore our individual creativity in!

highlights also included:

a just ducky tour of pittsburgh, which was way more family oriented than I had thought and involved some kind of youth-oriented family reunion. But also, lots of cheesy cheesy jokes, goofy operators, and pretty pittsburgh (who stopped with the raining long enough for us to sight-see)

also: hanging out while moving with strong friends and their bulging biceps,
dinner with mariss and kelly and michelle and koray,
busting in on a bbq, returning tools, seeing some pals, and liberating some deviled eggs before hitting the road,

and look at pretty friend kelly!

Well, the Pharm-spam found me again. I had a blissful month of no comments to delete, and today I had 245 to delete. YUCK. you know, I’d like to think that the pharm. companies would be pissed at all the bad advertising they’re getting from spammers, but I guess they probably figure any advertising is good advertising.

I’ve gone to the gym 3 times this week — wednesday was my trainer/get to know you option, and then I went last night and tonight. With my membership I got a real live trainer session where they set me up with a routine, and talked to me about strengthening my bad knee! So last night when I got there I pulled my card and followed the directions for the upper body. This morning I wanted to try out the whole “going to the gym in the morning” thing, and I did my lower body. And I have a few observations:

* elliptical trainers are freakin’ hard! yo, people who do them (like kelly!) you are seriously punk rock. I can do them slowly for 15 minutes no problem, but if I go any faster I don’t know how long I could go for, maybe only 10 min. WOW.

* my abs are seriously out of shape. I don’t know how I’ve avoided back injury! and today, after 3 days of doing crunches, they are TIGHT. like, I find myself hunching over so I don’t stretch them out. That’s no way to live!
(because I’m a gym dork, here’s what I’m crunching: straight crunches, 15 slow and 10 fast. on either side, 15 slow and 10 fast. On a ball: 15. Which means I’m doing, no kidding, 65 crunches, which makes me feel POWERFUL. and also, in agonizing pain!)

But all in all, I feel really really good working out. Like, all tough and junk. That’s a good feeling, totally. Very very good. And the gym is so great, very supportive, and I love seeing lots of normal everyday-type women working out and having a good time and chatting and being healthy. I love it!

I joined a gym and today is my first official day. I have a date there for the walk around/intro “personal training” session, so I guess I’ll get into it. I am kind weirded out by the whole “belonging to a gym” thing, but it is obvious that with my knee injury and full time job and commute I will never get off my keyster to get moving. So I need to pay someone to help me with that.

Although: this webpage makes me want to seriously begin lifting weights. she’s amazing! and they say that weight training is one of the best exercises for women, too.

Oh, here’s the dirty secret about the gym: it’s right next door to an ice cream parlor. No, really, it shares a wall and everything. How the heck am I going to work out and NOT get an ice cream cone on the way home? at least I have to walk to and from the gym, I mean, it’s SO CLOSE to my house that it would be silly not to. And that’s a good set up.

last weekend birdie drove down from NH, picked up matt and I, and we kicked it out to pittsburgh for the graduation ceremonies. I had a great time, highlights including:

* spending $1.85 on rummage sale items including: 5 charming glasses, 3 packs of cards, a bridge scoring pad, a milk glass vase, and a pad of writing paper.
* porch time at mariss and kelly’s with some of my nearest and dearests.
* sumptuous buffet reception at granulation.
* picking up in person my monstrous diploma (it’s VERY BIG. Will come in handy when it’s winter and my tar-papered shack lets the wind blow in, I can seal a large area of the interior with it).
* saw a whole-lotta people that I haven’t seen for a while and who I miss seeing all the time. What a great community they’ve got out there.
* car-pooled
* spent nice times with michelle.

And the weather back was BEAUTIFUL for a drive. And Birdie? is a rockstar trucker mama for her abilities to drive and drive and drive. The mister? the sultan of sleep for crashing out in the back seat, but I don’t have a leg to stand on b/c if I weren’t up front with Birdie I would have pooped out too!

I have a gift certificate to overstock.com and I’d like to spend it on a digicam, the better to endlessly document my life on the internets. as always, I’m THRIFTY and don’t want to spend too much cash. Here’s my criteria, in vague order of importance:

1. response time. I take a lot of snapshots and digicams have always REALLY frustrated me in the past with their very slow response time.
2. camera size — small is better!
3. picture quality

Can anyone offer any suggestions?

Because I’m the best daughter in the world, when my mom offered to do hard, manual labor day I accepted. Because mother’s day is all about doing what MOM wants, no?

I took the train up to albany on friday night and had a nice denny’s breakfast with dad+co. I wish sometimes I could order off of the senior menu, because some of the regular breakfasts are just too freakin’ big. I have really hard time with a 3 egg omelete! 2 eggs are plenty for me, thanks very much, esp. when accompanied by THREE MEATS.

Then mom arrived at my stepsisters house and we (with my brawny brother’s help and my adorable nephew’s support) loaded her old couch into mom’s truck, then tucked it in with my great-grampa’s table, strapped everything down, and took off for NJ. The mister met us there and we unloaded the couch which fits PERFECTLY where I wanted it to, yay! Mom is the first person other than the mister/his roommates/our friends who found the place to see the apartment. It’s a good one, really. when I’m done painting and unpacking, I’ll take pictures or something. We had a lovely dinner at a local greek resturant, and then we passed out just after 9PM. The next morning we braved the mothers day rush at the diner, and then she headed off down the road home.

It was really fun to spend so much time with her — it’s been a long time since we were able to. It’s always fun to show people something that is so new and exciting to me, and my new town and new apartment are definately still very new and exciting. Even though she couldn’t offer an objective opinion on my blue paint options, I’m very glad she came. And very glad she helped me! Yay Mom!

yesterday I painted for 10 hours straight. When I woke up I was actually surprised that my shoulder hurt so badly — I don’t know why, but I thought it would be much less painful. Yeouch! I painted my kitchen a pale pale pink, and it’s beautiful and bright now instead of dingy and dull. And I put the first coat of white over my gunmetal grey trim and painted the walls of the living room a beautiful peacock blue (it’s a behr color, if you want to look it up), which is a strong clear blue color. I love it. it’s going to look so fantastic.

the difficulty, of course because there is one, is that I have faux recessed walls in the living room which basically means there’s 3x the trim of a normal house. And the trim has been painted over a zillion times, so I’m pretty worried about my ability to have a strong straight line on the edges. I started painting around 2 PM and I did the 1st coat on the trim in 3 hours, and then it only took 1 1/2 hours or so to do the kitchen (because I’m not repainting the trim), and then it took me the next 5 hours to do edging and the walls in the living room. And I have to do another coat! it’s terrible. But if I’m good, it’ll take 2 more days of hard applied labor: one more marathon stint for the 2nd coat of the blue, and another evening for the trim. I can’t WAIT to be done so I can really unpack — my deadline is this week. my informal deadline, of course.

I went to see a dear and old friends senior show today at CU. His work is amazing, precise, exact, gorgeous. It was good to see, because we’ve known each other for 7 years and he’s been very good at dodging questions about what he ‘DOES.’