Wellness Wednesday – Enchanted Rock

Posted on March 24, 2021 by Thistle

Last Thursday, a few members of my hiking group leadership team and I went out to Enchanted Rock State Park. It was Jennine’s birthday, and she wanted to conquer this rock for her special day. When she mentioned her plan, I was gung-ho and signed up immediately. But standing there at the bottom of the rock, I realized just how foolish and naive I’d been in agreeing to go.

(me, Kristina, Jennine, Melanie)

Y’all. My body was not ready for Enchanted Rock. My lungs were not ready. My heart was not ready. I’m carrying around sooooooo much excess weight, and while I’m strong and didn’t expect my muscles to complain too much about the 400+ climb at 30+ grade, I knew that the weight alone would make this challenging. But I wanted to do this for Jennine. Jennine, who had been unable to climb this rock earlier in her life, and who wanted to reach the summit that day. So even though my trepidation was enormous and a big part of me wanted to say, “You know what ladies? I’ll wait for y’all at the bottom,” I set off to climb with them.

It is hard to capture just how intimidating this climb is. From a distance, it looks like a smooth, rounded dome that might make an easy walk. Up close, you just go up and up and up. At times you have to walk sideways because the slope is too steep to do otherwise. Huge swaths are unbroken rock, with nothing to hold onto or support you if you start leaning back too far. The rock is broken in places with giant boulders, trees that grow miraculously out of the granite itself, and tiny micro-ecosystems in puddles that trail into mini-oasis of grass, minute succulents, and all sorts of underwater creatures. You zigzag your way through all of this to reach the top, marked by a small flat disk that you have to search for if you want to reach the “official” highest point.

(birthday girl at the top!)

This was my fifth (?) trip to Enchanted Rock, and my fourth in adulthood. (I know I went at least once as a teenager, but I don’t have any specific memories or photos of the trip(s).) It was the first time I didn’t know if I would make it. Y’all, there were times when I would traipse forward about 10-20 FEET and have to stop for another rest because my heart rate was too high and I was gasping for breath. I’m told that the entire thing is like climbing 45 flights of stairs, and at my current size, stopping to catch my breath after every single flight (after the first few) is just about right!! It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I’ve climbed this rock many times, but before Thursday last week, the heaviest my body has been on the trip is about 50 lbs lighter than I currently am. Those 50 lbs make an insane amount of difference. I really did nearly give up multiple times. (Pictured above is my four adult trips, though I don’t have a photo of myself from 1999 on the Rock, just a picture of the day before. That was the lightest I’ve hiked this in adulthood, in the 130s.)

It was my fellow hikers who kept me going. The motto of our group is No Woman Left Behind, but this was not a hike set up through the group. No one had to stick to that philosophy, and yet they did. Because we all take those words to heart. That’s what makes this group so special, y’all. Even typing this up, I have tears in my eyes because the three of them were so much more fit than me and I know I was holding them back, but they never once made me feel like I was. They encouraged me and pushed me, and we all got to the top together. And I admit, I felt a little bad about it all, because this was Jennine’s special day, not mine. I didn’t want to keep calling attention to myself with all my stop-needs. I’m just really happy to say that despite all the help everyone had to give me, it was a good day for everyone, and I wasn’t the only one to feel elated to reach the top.

(this is nowhere near the top, heh)

Back in the fall, I was signed up to hike Enchanted Rock, but dropped out because I knew my heart/lungs weren’t ready. In preparation for the hike, I tried to go up the gully at a nearby park, which is a roughly a third of elevation of Enchanted Rock at an easier grade. I could not get all the way to the top without stopping due to my heart rate going too high and making me feel dizzy, and needing to gasp for breath. It was frustrating, because I could still run a mile or longer without those problems, but going up a steep elevation was just too much for my body. And that was before the Ozempic injections caused me to gain 15 more pounds! I really wasn’t ready for the hike last week, but somehow, I made it through. I got to the top.

(that’s me in the blue, struggling through my next few feet of climbing, heh)

But I have to be honest: As much triumph as I felt on finally getting there, I also felt a combination of relief, disappointment in myself, anger at my body’s situation, guilt for holding everyone back, and an overwhelming shame that I haven’t felt in many years. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of being at a size where everything hurts, where clothes are hard to shop for, where I’m self-conscious all the time, where I’m limited in the things I can do. I’m tired of feeling frustrated and helpless and hopeless because nothing works and nothing changes and no doctor will listen. I’m tired of having no solutions, and feeling like my life is slipping away from me. That’s what I felt at the top of that rock. Not the unadulterated joy I should have felt getting there with my friends on an absolutely beautiful day.

This isn’t a post about doubling down and determination. Frankly, I’m too exhausted for that. I don’t know how to move forward, or what next steps to take. In October, I’m set to spend a week at Big Bend with a bunch of fellow hikers, and I see that the elevation gain there is 2000 feet – 4 to 5x the gain at Enchanted Rock. I haven’t been to Big Bend since I was 16 years old (and about 120 lbs) and I’m terrified now that I’m going to spend the week holding everyone back and taking days off at the AirBnB so no one feels obligated to wait for me. I don’t want that trip to be that way!!!!! I want to go to that park and feel amazing and tackle those mountains and be with my people. I want to be happy in my body and to feel the amazing power that our bodies have within us. I don’t want to just hurt the whole time. I want joy back again. I don’t know how to get there over the next few months, but I have to try, yeah? Somehow?

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The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner

Posted on March 22, 2021 by Thistle

In the past: an apothecary named Nella dispenses poisons to select customers, helping women to rid themselves of men who have betrayed them. In the present: Caroline is alone in London on what was supposed to be her tenth wedding anniversary vacation until a secret of her husband’s came out. The two stories intersect in a way that changes many lives.

That is a terrible synopsis, but the GoodReads one says too much and I didn’t want to give away too many things. This is a book best left to unfurl slowly and weave itself together chapter by alternating chapter. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I chose this book as my March Book of the Month selection, whether it would step into the realm of the speculative or stay firmly in the realities of alternative medicine in the late 1700s. (Mostly the latter, as it turns out.) The book was part history, part mystery, part women’s fiction, part coming-of-age. It doesn’t really fit into a specific genre, and I loved that.

This is the first fictional book I’ve enjoyed since November. I read it slowly over a week or so, lapping up each little twist and discovery. For some reason, I’d gotten the impression that something specific was going to happen (from the description? from what BotM said in their description? from my own assumptions?) and I kept waiting for it. (It never happened. Heh.) Instead, the book went down an entirely different path than I expected, and kept me entertained and intrigued. The ending was so appropriately ambiguous that it was perfect.

The only thing that I disliked was the treatment of Caroline’s husband. He was very two-dimensional, a plot device without a real personality and whose feelings, reactions, and actions flitted around with so many random changes that it was hard to see his purpose in the book at all. With the rest of the characters drawn as vivid and real as they were, it was just this little hole in the story where something really poignant could have been, regardless of which direction/personality/actions the husband embodied.

Otherwise, though, I quite enjoyed the novel. It felt really nice to finally read something that I really loved again after soooooo many months of dry spell!

Posted in 2021, Adult, Prose | Tagged | 1 Comment

Sunday Coffee – More Little Things

Posted on March 21, 2021 by Thistle

It’s another of those weeks when so many little things are happening and none of them are worth a full blog post and all of them I want a record of. Perhaps my brain is just a bit scattered lately. My thoughts really do seem to be running in circles.

New toys: I’ve mentioned the pain and swelling in my left foot from the last few months, and I discuss this more in depth in the next section. Last week, Jason and I decided to put part of our tax refund toward a rower, thinking it would be a good way for me to exercise off my feet (or at least, less pressure on them!). We got a fairly low-level ProForm model, which came home on the 11th. First time using it, I had to stop twice in ten mins, ha! My body is def not used to this, but it’ll be a good exercise eventually. Unfortunately, after that first time, Laurence tripped on the cord and broke the head off, so we had to go in search for a new one (which we finally found yesterday). Our other new toy is the Ring Fit. Laurence and Ambrose pooled their money to buy a Switch, and Jason and I decided to get the Ring to go with it. It’s a fun little way to get in exercise, and reminds me of the days we were all excited about the Wii Fit when we got that one back in 2011!

Foot: My foot has been so bad lately** – swollen and painful – and I started to think that I might have a stress fracture or something. So I made a doc appt on Monday (after getting the rower, ironically) and started the ball rolling on getting x-rays, specialist care, potential MRIs, etc. She checked to make sure it’s not something vascular or circulatory, which is isn’t, and she agreed that it was likely stress fracture or ligament tear or something similar. I had a series of X-rays taken on Friday, and I see the specialist on Thursday this week. Likely I will need an MRI, I’m told, but we’ll see what the specialist and X-rays say.

**and by “lately,” I mean “since mid-October.”

Birthday: Laurence’s 17th birthday was last week, as I mentioned that weekend. We didn’t do much for his birthday. It was low-key, his second covid-birthday. But L tends to like things low-key, so that wasn’t too much of a problem. He got to rent a movie of his choice (he chose The Devil Wears Prada, which none of us had seen – it was quite good!), and then he ordered Chinese food curbside for dinner. We made donuts – in oil after a disastrous attempt at an air fryer version that basically turned them into weird bagels – for his requested dessert. Then he and Ambrose played Splatoon 2 all night (he got that for his birthday). (Yes, he was making that face on purpose in that picture. It’s a thing he does.)

Job: A few weeks into this semester, Ambrose decided to leave school. (He really hates online school.) So we told him that he needed to get a job instead – he couldn’t just hang around the house watching TikTok, yeah? So he began applying, and when the one he wanted fell through, he began work at our local nursery. (On Laurence’s birthday!) His first day was a ten-hour shift – he posed for this photo afterwards to show how “tired” he was. Unfortunately, he had a minor car accident on the way home, running over a curb in our neighborhood when his foot slipped off the pedal. (He’s not used to wearing his work boots yet.) It popped/slashed the front tire of Jason’s car, so suddenly we had to go out and replace both front tires. Sigh. At least no one was hurt, right?

More new toys: My trail shoes were absolutely obliterated at a hike a few weeks back, caked with clay that I couldn’t get off for the life of me. (A friend in the same situation literally had to use a pressure washer on her shoes!!) Since mine were a year old anyway and needed replacing, plus I had a few rewards from Fleet Feet to use before May, I skipped the pressure washer and got new trail runners. I also decided to get with the trend with a new Hydro Flask because my other water choices on hikes were 1) a small running bottle that didn’t insulate, or 2) a full-on Camelbak, which is a bit overkill for a 3-4 mile walk/hike!

5K: So you know how I was saying I missed in-person 5Ks so much? Well, I’ve signed up for one in May! It’s limited in-person participation (max 250 people) and there’s still a possibility that it’ll have to go virtual due to what circumstances will be like at that point. We’ll see. It’s a 5K I did (virtually) last year. I’d signed up before covid, and the event got delayed, and then turned to all virtual in July. Some friends of a friend host this one to raise funds for pediatric brain cancer research, so it’s a good cause!

Plant-mom: I’ve officially become a plant-mom in addition to a cat-lady. Not sure how that happened, as I hated plants and touching any kind of “nature” for years. Turns out, it was really just grass that I hated (and still do!). So in addition to all the gardening and landscaping we’re doing lately, Jason bought me a hibiscus to keep indoors! It’s hard to find plants that are nontoxic for cats that you can keep indoors, but this is one of them. In the picture, it’s outdoors because it had a ton of new water put in when we transplanted it from its plastic container, and we didn’t have a tray for it yet. But it’s going to go in the corner by the french doors, getting plenty of light! It’s blooming all over, too, which makes me so happy! I’ve been taking waaaaay too many photos, ha!

Torrid: For the first time, this company has really disappointed me with horrible customer service. They sent me a birthday reward of $15, which I used on an item that didn’t end up fitting. When I returned it, they gave me back the money I spent on it, but not the $15 birthday reward. I asked, and they said basically too bad so sad. Rewards, once used, can’t be refunded even if you don’t keep an item. WTF, Torrid? How’s that for my (nonexistent) birthday gift? Definitely means I’m less likely to shop Torrid in the future, grr.

Baby shower: Fellow hiker/hike-leader Lindsay is now about 33/34 weeks along in her first pregnancy, and the leadership team threw her a surprise baby shower yesterday morning under the guise of our monthly leader hike. It was chaotic and not at all like we were originally planning (the park was SO FULL because of youth sports games, and we had to move areas twice because apparently we chose spots that were reserved), but it was also really awesome. Food and games and gifts all covidified to be safe especially for the future mama. And it turned out that while we expected she’d had other baby showers already, she’d opted out of them and feeling a bit sad about that, so this was just perfect. It feels so nice to have a group of friends who care enough to do stuff like this for each other!

So that was my week. I had to opt out of this morning’s hike due to foot/hip issues and massive #plaguelife mask-line sunburn from yesterday’s event (you can see it a bit in the coffee photo above). Sooooooo much has been happening that I’m quite overwhelmed – all good things, so I don’t mind! – and hoping to take today as a way to rest, recuperate, reorganize, and get caught up!!

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Quarantine Diaries – Weeks 52 and 53

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Thistle

I feel like we’re currently in the calm before the storm. We’re hitting all sorts of record lows, or lowest-lows-in-months at least, and we’re getting people vaccinated as quickly as possible. But of course, all covid safety measures were removed by the state on March 10th, so by the end of the month, we’ll see increasing numbers again. These are the weeks that are still benefitting from the work that came before – like I said: calm before the storm. I’m trying to enjoy them while I can!

Week 52 – March 5 to 11
199,431 cases, 2,861 deaths, 186 seven-day rolling average, 2.6% positivity rate (down 3%, and now the lowest its been since this started being calculated!!). Hospital patients and admissions continue to decline as well. With things going so well, SA has moved down to a “low” risk level, woohoo! At our local high school, it’s spring break, so there have obviously been no reports.

Of course, it won’t last. Not only is it spring break this week – and people do stupid things on spring break – the state-wide mask mandate was rescinded on Wednesday as promised, and all occupancy limits on all businesses were lifted. In the next month, we’ll see what comes of bars opening up to full capacity with no masks, given that bars have historically been one of the biggest spreaders of covid nationwide. Many businesses have drawn their lines in the sand, and (thankfully) most are requiring masks, but for the most part, bars are treating this as a reason to party. Tons of stuff related to the new policy happened this week:

  • Before the order even went into effect, the governor preemptively began to blame immigrants for the upcoming covid surge. He keeps talking about how the Biden administration is letting “hundreds and hundreds” of covid-positive illegal immigrants into the state and that those immigrants are then spreading the disease. None of this is true in any way, of course, but the rhetoric is working on people who already believe the crap Faux News shoves down their throats. (I know people who genuinely believe this fiction.)
  • Across the state, people started planning mask-burning and “un-masking” parties.
  • The city and county put out a new emergency order that says businesses must post visible signage stating their health/mask policies at entrances, so that no one can claim they don’t know the policy. Then, if someone refuses to follow the private business’s policy, they can call the police, and the troublemaker will be escorted off-premises and/or arrested for criminal trespass.
  • Other cities, like Austin, have said that despite the governor’s order, businesses must continue to require masks due to a local order from the health authority, which supersedes governmental authority. This directive is already being challenged in court, and depending on how that legal action goes, we may consider doing something similar here in SA.
  • Many school districts are continuing to require masks and not changing their current policies, like ours. Unfortunately, there are others that have said it’s now up to each individual parent. In one case, the decision was made without input from the school board or anything. Ugh.
  • Originally, HEB said it would require masks for employees and “strongly recommend” them for customers because it would be too tough/dangerous to try to force a mandate on people contrary to government orders. However, the thousands of HEB employees fought back and demanded that the chain require masks in their stores, and hurrah, HEB reversed course and is doing just that!

In other news, the state announced that starting March 15th, people who qualify under Phase 1c (aged 50+) will now qualify for vaccines. Our local leaders are exasperated, because literally 75% of our population falls under Phases 1a-c, and we’re not getting nearly enough doses to vaccinate the over 2 million folks who qualify. They did get another 40K doses in for the next four weeks. Jason spent last Friday volunteering at the vaccination site and is waiting for another slot to open up – if he spends two shifts as a volunteer, he’ll be able to get his vaccine even though he doesn’t yet qualify. One of the perks of being a volunteer! Fingers crossed a slot opens soon! I was also really excited by the updated CDC guidelines for vaccinated folks, saying that those who have been fully vaccinated may now safely get together in small groups indoors and without masks. Hurrah!

Last but definitely not least, do y’all remember me talking about the strip club that kept getting citations for refusing to follow covid guidelines? Back in November or so, the city yanked their certificate of occupancy to shut them down, and they sued the city, and the city sued them back. I have no idea how those court cases came out, but the strip club is back in the news. Apparently, they began opening again in January without a license to operate. They received five citations for operating without an occupancy certificate. The city shut electricity off to the building. The strip club brought in a generator and opened up that way. The city cut off the water supply to the building. That was the last thing I heard, but MAN I’m so frickin’ amused by this ridiculous story and will continue to look for the strip club’s next zany move. Ha!

PS – It’s spring break this week in most of TX. Let’s just pray that no one does anything too stupid over spring break and causes even more outbreak/spread than removing the mask order…

Week 53 – March 12 to 18
201,273 cases, 2,295 deaths, 146 seven-day rolling average, 5.6% positivity rate (3% increase). Notably, there was a drastic decrease in testing for the week this rate was calculated (from ~60k to ~20k) due to spring break, as several of the school districts have been working with an independent lab to administer daily tests. The rise in rate could possibly be contributed to the decrease solely because many of the absent tests are proactive rather than symptomatic. I guess we’ll see what happens next week. No reports from the school this week. Hospitals are down to 202 patients which is marvelous!

So the virus has been in our community for a year now, and we hit a few milestones this week. We passed the 200k mark for cases over the weekend. At the same time, the number of vaccinated folks in our community surpassed our total case number for the first time, which is really awesome even if it’s only about 10% of the total community vaccinated. Hopefully vaccinations will continue to go smoothly – we did hear that some doctors’ offices have been reallocating designated second-dose shipments as first-dose vaccines, so that they run out and folks can’t get their second doses, which is eek.

Unfortunately, the removal of the mask order has led to another consequence that was easily foreseeable: mask-related conflict. While I’ve yet to hear about folks getting shot over masks like in the early days of the pandemic, one of my friends was attacked for wearing a mask. She kept walking away, and the (not-masked) offender kept pursuing her, shouting and getting up close in her face. Ugh!

We celebrated Laurence’s second covid birthday this week, the first of us to have a second birthday under a pandemic. What a milestone.

Moving forward
Hoping that vaccinations can keep up with the potential increases coming from bad government leadership and people being stupid over spring break…

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Wellness Wednesday – Hikes of 2021, #17-23

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Thistle

Time for another round of hike-logs!

17. Both times that I’ve been out to this park now, it’s been solid fog! Today, we had rain in addition to fog, and tons of mud. Only one trail was open, and it was a completely different trail than any that I hiked on my last visit in the fall. It’s such a pretty park and one day I’ll actually get to see it in the sun, ha! Even with all the slipping and shoes that were completely ruined afterwards, this was a really fun day. We’re thinking about trying some horseback riding out there some day too!  [Hike 11/52 for my 52 Hike Challenge.]

Continue reading →

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Things My Kids Said

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Thistle

Last night, I was reading a really funny story about Steph the Bookworm‘s son Caleb, which I’ll let her tell on her own blog if she chooses. It made me flash back to when my boys were little, and all the silly things they used to say without realizing:

From the song “Instanbul (Not Constantinople),” Laurence would sing, “Even ol’ New York was once New Hamster Dance.”

There was this mound of dirt at the local park when my family lived in Cuba City, WI, and many kids used this mound as a mountain or volcano. We used to call it the volcano, and once, when we told Morrigan we were taking him there, he said, “I don’t want to go to the small-cano! I want to go to the BIG-cano!”

We used to buy cheap-brand country spread, and Ambrose – who spoke late and had a difficult time with sounds for a very long time – told us that the spread was “a koosh ball in the water.” We thought we were misunderstanding him, but eventually he pointed to the photo on the spread and repeated it. Sure enough: koosh ball in the water, to his eyes.

Ambrose was also the one who used to tell people we were growing “Hallelujahs” in our yard. They were calla lilies.

Of course, that’s nothing compared to when Laurence began speaking. He was 13 months old and had been saying random individual words for months (he was very early!), when he popped out with a fully constructed and clearly spoken sentence: “This is a cracker.” He punctuated each syllable with a pat on the place where he wanted us to put some crackers down for a snack. He then proceeded to say “this is a cracker” all the time, only he shortened it to “this is crack” and later just to “crack?” while pointing to various things. So, you know, this got repeated at the doctor’s office, at church, in the grocery store… 😀

Also Laurence, looking at an Apples to Apples card when he was a little earlier: “Who the heck is Saint Bernard?”

For years, Morrigan refused to use the word pilot, instead choosing to use “airplane driver.” He even went as an “airplane driver” at Halloween one year.

Laurence yelling, “No I amn’t!” as his own play on contractions – which I’ve since discovered is actually in use in Ireland, though definitely not in the US.

And one of my favorites, before I leave this for the day. Back in fall 2008, we took our boys out for ice cream and the song “No Rain” came on overhead. When we got home, I decided to show the boys the music video. Laurence didn’t really pay attention. Morrigan kept repeating a few questions over and over without giving anyone a chance to answer. (“Why is she running away? Where is she going?”) But it was really Ambrose’s reaction that I remember clearly. At one point, there’s a close-up of the little bee-girl twirling, and as that came up, Ambrose spoke up spontaneously: “She’s beautiful!” Remember that Ambrose hardly ever spoke, and at this time, he was only six years old. I remember thinking just how lovely it was to be young and free of the trappings of society’s idea of “beautiful.”

There have been many others over the years, but those are the ones that popped to mind this morning. Every day, I look back on my facebook memories, and I’m glad that at one point I started keeping record of all the fun and interesting things my boys said. I’m glad that before then, I had a few years of personal blogging where I kept a record of family stuff, including this sort of thing. Now if only I had some for the years between Morrigan’s birth and when I started said blog in 2008…sigh. I have to rely solely on memory for that!

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Sunday Coffee – Spring Forward

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Thistle

Here we go again! These are my seasonal “bucket list” goals for spring. They start today, the first day of “spring forward” into the wonderful Daylight Savings Time, and go through May 15th for a total of nine weeks. I’ve gone really light on these, with only twelve goals (and some of those are conditional).

(I am SO BAD at drawing people, ha!)

Buy new pajamas: I’ve been wearing my current sets of spring/summer/fall pajamas (which I wear for almost all of winter, too, because it’s just hot here!) for at least three or four years now. It’s really time to replace them!

Try out one of my bellydancing workout videos: I have lots of these (physical and bookmarked online) and I think they’d be fun to do, but I never think to try them! So on the list it goes.

Meet up with an old friend: This is an “only if possible” goal re: covid.

Buy a new alarm clock: I don’t use the alarm on my alarm clock, but I do like being able to see the time at night when I wake up and it’s still dark. My current alarm clock is something like 17/18 years old. It’s falling apart and periodically does weird, possessed things because all the wiring is going bad. But it’s really hard to find a current-day alarm clock with red numbers rather than LED blue (which affects wakefulness).

Listen to the Hamilton soundtrack: I’m probably the last person in the world that has never listened to Hamilton. I’m not really a fan of musicals, but I’m enjoying the new style of them more and more, and I’d like to try this one out. Fingers crossed!

Buy a denim sundress: I love denim dresses and especially sundresses, so I’m going to try hard to find one that fits me this year!

Listen to the Murdoch Mysteries podcast: Given how obsessed with Murdoch Mysteries I’ve been, this one should be easy!

Listen to the Unsolved Mysteries podcast: Ditto! I only found out this existed two weeks ago!

Make something with macrame: My newest obsession!

Reach 175 miles for the year: Beginning at 93 miles – this one will be tough!

Attempt C25K: I got all the way through the program last year and eventually went on to run a full 5K, but since then I’ve lost a lot of fitness and additionally gained a lot of weight, so I’m basically starting all over again. This is an “if my foot/hip/weight will let me” goal.

Finish my YWA backlog: Mostly this is from the Breath program in January, plus a few others.

Here we go!

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Anniversary: The Day the World Exploded

Posted on March 13, 2021 by Thistle

It’s been one year today since covid officially came to San Antonio. Friday the 13th, my son’s 16th birthday, the “last” day of spring break, and the start of an entirely new world. Today, I look back on the weeks that led up to this anniversary.

March 1, 2020: My 41st birthday. That day, I walked a crowded 5K with Jason and Stephanie in the morning, and spent the afternoon with several dozen of my hiking friends at an anniversary potluck. We’d all heard of covid, of course, but other than the evacuees at a local air force base – a situation we were told would be entirely contained and kept away from the SA public – it was a far-away thing that wasn’t really affecting much of daily life at that point.

March 2: You know that whole “it would be contained and kept away from the SA public” thing? An evacuee from Wuhan had been let out of quarantine after two negative tests, though several others were still pending. You know, back when we didn’t know enough about incubation periods and how to test for covid correctly. Further tests came back positive after this woman spent time in SA. North Star Mall shut down for a day to deep clean the entire building. Thankfully, no spread came from this situation, but it was the first real scare in SA.

March 6: The boys left in-person school that afternoon for a week of spring break, not knowing they wouldn’t return to this day. Or ever, in Ambrose’s case, as it was his senior year.

March 8: I went on a six-mile hike with eight other women. At the halfway point, where we stopped at the dinosaur tracks before turning around for the return hike, a couple folks began talking about covid and offering around hand sanitizer. Some people took a squirt. Others, like me, didn’t bother. I think I even remember saying something like “I’m not worried about it.” Little did we know that it would be our last hike for months (or for almost a year, in Stephanie’s case). After the hike, Stephanie and I had an amazing breakfast at Eggspectation, which was so crowded that we had to wait outside for nearly an hour for a table. We really weren’t worried at all yet.

Note: March 8th was my “last good day,” or what my brain internalized as such. When the one-year-pandemic-anniversary posts started going up, it was on this day that I began to grieve. It wasn’t even a day when I was worried about covid yet, but my brain solidified this as The Day. (That link leads to the instagram post where I discussed said grief.)

March 11: The NBA canceled the rest of its season. This is the moment when I realized the enormity of what was coming toward us. Between the 8th and the 11th, we’d had a flurry of news stories and calls and such. Morrigan called from Kansas and was freaked out about the terrible situation in Italy. His school announced that they’d be going online only after spring break (which later turned into “online and no one is allowed to be on campus at all”). Jason was sent to work from home for the rest of the week. But it was the NBA actually canceling the season – not delaying, but canceling – that hit home. That’s when I got nervous. I still didn’t understand just how serious the situation would eventually be, or how long it would last. There have been pandemic/epidemic outbreaks quite often over the last decade or two, and none had touched us directly. As of March 11, we’d had no real problems here in SA. Maybe it would blow over, I thought.

March 12: Laurence and I went to HEB for some mid-week shopping. We knew there wouldn’t be any toilet paper – that insanity had already started – but mostly the store was well-stocked. For the last time in months. Additionally, my cousin remarked that she hoped this “would all blow over” before Jason’s and my planned cruise in May.

March 13th: This was the day that all hell broke loose in San Antonio. Friday the 13th. Our first case of covid in the city, excluding the evacuees at the base. So much changed on this day. The 5K Jason and I were supposed to run on the 14th went from “this is still happening” emails on the 12th to “this has to be canceled” emails on the 13th, due to the gathering limit that was put in place. Siclovia was canceled. Fiesta was moved to November. UIL was delayed. Libraries closed and haven’t been open to the public again since. Symphony cancelled til late April (and eventually beyond). The school announced it would extend spring break for another week while they figured out what to do. Panic-buying (other than toilet paper) began, and Jason ran out to the grocery store to see if he could get anything for our weekly trip before it was all gone (photo of the shelves that day above). He was also told to work from home “for the foreseeable future,” which eventually became “indefinitely.” He has not been in the office again since.

It’s funny to look back on that day now. The last-minute attempt to grocery shop before nothing was left. The fact that we literally went to lunch at Magnolia Pancake Haus for Laurence’s birthday ( <– ), knowing that pretty soon the city was going to shut down restaurants. (It was our last time in a restaurant in months. In the year since, Jason has been in one restaurant while traveling to Kansas to take Morrigan to school, and I’ve been inside three in rural areas after long-distance hikes. And that’s it.) The sudden change at Morrigan’s university that sent all the kids home. All the emails I started getting from companies about reduced hours, or closing stores to go online only, etc. The canceling and postponing of doctor appointments, including the dental crown Jason was supposed to get at the end of March and had to wait until May for. My hands-down most naive statement of 2020? “I canceled my upcoming chiropractor appointment – that can wait until this blows over!” Within a week, I was posting my Quarantine Diaries series, never thinking that here I’d be, still posting it a year later.

The situation had become real, but silly me still thought we’d all lock down and get things under control in a couple weeks, or at worst, months. I didn’t foresee the insanity that is mask-politicizing and covid-is-a-hoax crap, or the lackadaisical, nonexistent, and/or actively harmful response from the government at federal and state levels. Stephanie told me that she thought we’d have to go on rolling lockdowns for the next 18 months to two years until a vaccine could be developed, tested, and distributed, and I was just dumbfounded by the idea. She was right, though – well, she didn’t figure on all the stupidity either, and so thought we’d have periods outside of lockdown rather than just different levels of it. Sigh.

So that was a year ago. Today is my son’s 17th birthday – his second birthday under a global pandemic. (Pic: three-frame dance from a few days ago that we put into a color app, heh.) My middle son, Ambrose, is starting his first job today. The oldest, Morrigan, is up at school in Kansas. I’m grateful that we are all okay. I’ve known friends and family with various severities of covid, and so far, everyone is still here with us. Others have not been so fortunate, and everyone has had to adapt in one way or another. On a personal level, there are a few things that I miss so much that it gives me physical pain to think of them: my local library; in-person 5K events; having my days alone and silent; extended family gatherings; HUGS.

But it wouldn’t be an anniversary post without giving a brief shoutout to those things that have kept me sane over the last year: my hiking group (of course!!); the Real Life Ghost Stories Podcast and the corresponding facebook group, which floods my timeline with all the fun and spooky paranormal memes and gives each day some lighthearted moments; apps like Marco Polo that helped me to stay in (visible) contact with friends and family; the massive increase in digital downloads (both audio and ebook) from the library; the friends who made better masks than we could buy and who provided food and supplies the times when our family had to suddenly lock down completely; running, which gave me purpose for a long part of this year; the local government’s attempts to counteract the horrible state and federal leadership; and the incredible efforts to get vaccines engineered for us all so quickly.

I hope that by this time next year, the world is in better shape, despite the insanity that is “multiple states removing covid precautions way too early right now.” One day I’d love to eat in restaurants without fear again, and to travel, and to go on larger-group hikes, and have potlucks with my friends, and hang out at the cafe, and see movies in theatre, and browse books at the library, and see my extended family for the first time in over a year. I want to hug people, and see smiles from a closer distance than six feet, and take photos with people all clumped together instead of spread out, and never have to rely on Zoom-like programs again. None of us have gone unaffected, but it’s my fervent hope that we all make it through safely to the other side.

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Off Menu, by Nell McShane Wulhart (audio)

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Thistle

Subtitled: The Secret Science of Food & Dining

From GoodReads: “Off Menu is a charming, fun-fact-filled deep dive into the little-known science of food and dining: why we eat what we eat, the nuances of our experience of taste and flavor, and the tiny, easy hacks and tweaks that, when mastered, can make a huge difference in our diets, meals, and relationships with food and drink.”

This is a book about food perceptions and how our experience of eating is influenced by far more than just the taste of food. It runs along the same lines as books I’ve previously read like Real Food, Fake Food and Mindless Eating, and quotes from many other books I’ve either read in part or in whole. (Shows you how many books about food and food history I read, no? Heh.) There is a lot of good information in here – so much, in fact, that I actually wished I had a physical copy at times, because I couldn’t take in everything all at once. Though the audiobook is under six hours, it took me about three weeks to listen to it. There was just SO MUCH in there, and I needed time to process each bit.

For me, the most interesting and poignant lesson had to do with an experiment involving a smoothie mix. I’m going to have to paraphrase this – no physical copy – so I might get some details wrong, but this is the gist. Participants were given two smoothies to drink. One was labeled with words like “rich” and “indulgent,” and had a nutritional label saying that it was over 600 calories. The other had words like “light” and “healthy,” with a label saying it was under 300 calories. In reality, it was the exact same content and the calorie level was somewhere between the two labels. Now, as you might expect, participants reported that the “indulgent” smoothie tasted better than the “light” smoothie. They also said they felt fuller and more satisfied with the first. But here’s where things got interesting: They actually were fuller after drinking the first smoothie. Tests were done to show that their ghrelin levels decreased significantly more and their metabolism ramped up to deal with the expected calorie load.

Their perception of how much they were eating actually affected how their body processed the food. 

You can see the implications, yeah? We talk about calories in vs calories out, and how weight loss happens when you’re in an energy deficit. But what does it mean to be in an energy deficit when your brain can literally adjust your metabolism based on what it thinks it’s eating? No wonder weight loss is such a complicated thing – especially as this is literally only one tiny fragment of the equation??

Now, I don’t want to give anyone the impression that this book is about weight loss. It’s not. It’s research into perceptions of food based on different senses. There are sections about how music in different keys can change how sweet or salty you perceive a dish, and how the color and shape of plates will affect the taste of food, and the incredible market research and development that goes into everything from packaging aroma (did you know that the smell of vanilla ice cream is actually a chemical on the lid because you can’t smell a frozen product?) to the color and font of a brand name. It’s fascinating.

Performance: Katie Schorr did a fine job reading this book, though I do recommend that if you really want to get deep into the science here, or take down tips for better dinner parties, you should get yourself a physical copy. Assuming you can find one, because as far as I can find online, only an audio version exists at this point.

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Wellness Wednesday – Miscellany

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Thistle

It’s been one of those weeks where so many health/fitness things happened, none of them worth their own post, and I don’t really have much else to say, so here’s a bunch of mini-things.

Endocrinologist: I finally had my specialist appointment with the endocrinologist this week. Specialists can take SOOOOOOO long to get in with! In any case, the doctor agreed that my symptoms didn’t match PCOS, especially given the treatments failing in every single case. She asked me a ton of questions, some of which were really odd (like “What’s your favorite podcast?”). Then she said she wanted to test me for Cushing Syndrome. Essentially this is an overproduction of cortisol over a long period of time, and I can definitely see this as being at the root of the issues I have! At the end of the month, I’m supposed to take a special medication to suppress cortisol and then have blood drawn to see what happens. Then we’ll go from there.

C25K: Last year, I completed the Couch to 5K program (after about five months of work!) and continued to run through the end of July, when I finally ran a full 5K without stopping. While I continued to run afterwards, my training was soon derailed by injury and medication problems that included sudden weight increase. Now, I’m starting over, this time 15 lbs heavier than before. I really want to get my cardio health into better shape, and to keep running as part of my workout routines. I did my first session last week and definitely found it easier than when I started last year, despite the increased weight. (Pic from last year’s C25K)

Massage: I had my first massage since early December and it was ohhhhhhhh. That’s one of my least favorite things to give up when covid numbers rise, and I could definitely tell it had been awhile. There were muscles that were so tight that my masseuse had to use far less pressure than usual, and times when I actually jumped due to a painful spot. I have a bajillion massages saved up from monthly membership fees that I haven’t used in the last year, so I’m setting this to every two weeks for awhile!

Dermatologist: Last week, a thumbprint-sized dark spot appeared on my back between my shoulder blades. I thought it was a bruise at first, but it looked weird from what I could see in the mirror, so Jason took a look. He took a photo and sent it to his parents (a retired PA and nurse), who agreed that it looked unusual and that I should get it checked out. It stuck around for about four days and then just disappeared in pieces, not gradually fading the way you’d expect from a bruise. Thankfully, this was not a specialist that took two months to get an appointment, and I was seen on Monday. Of course, by then the spot was completely gone (at least I had a picture!) and there was little they could tell me. The doc did check me over for any signs of weird skin abnormalities and found nothing, so at least that’s good. Still, it felt like a bit of a waste of time and money. Oh well.

Cyst: Sigh. Okay – so back in January 2020, I very suddenly got a marble-sized rock-hard cyst on my wrist (above). I didn’t know what the heck it was, but I couldn’t even bend my hand 90 degrees without pain, and couldn’t put any pressure on the wrist at all (not even simple pressure like cat/cow position in yoga). I went to my doctor, who said it was a fibrous ganglion cyst and referred me to an orthopedic surgeon. As a specialist, it took months to get an appointment, and I was scheduled for March 9th. A few days before my appointment, the cyst disappeared as suddenly as it arrive. I spoke with the specialist’s office, and they said sometimes this happens, and sometimes it’ll come and go, but they’d keep my referral on file for a year. So my referral expired yesterday, and guess what popped back into existence? Yeah. I don’t need a referral for my insurance, so I just needed to make an appointment, but I’m amused by the irony. Thankfully, because I’m already on the list, I can get in quicker, and am set for the 22nd.

So that’s all the little things that have been going on. I’ve also been experiencing some one-year-later pandemic grief this week, but I discussed that more on FB and Instagram, and I have a post about the anniversary coming later, so I’m not going to go into it here. Suffice to say that its been a wild week, and sometimes self-care looks like tons of medical appointments while drinking too much iced coffee and maybe some retail therapy that you can’t really afford…

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