Wellness Wednesday – Ending the War

Posted on February 27, 2019 by Thistle

“My body is my home. It’s the only place I have to live. I will treat it with the care and respect it deserves.” –mantra from Day 1 of Molly Galbraith’s Love Your Body Challenge

Five years ago, I took the above challenge. I was at a healthy weight and felt fairly good about my body, but still struggled with certain body image issues. The challenge was amazing. It did so much for my self-esteem and my relationship with my body. And of course, a lot of that was undone when all the Bad Things happened in the months following that challenge. I developed a terrible relationship with my body that has continued for the past five years. It’s been like war: constantly battling, trying to be body-positive and to love my body despite weight regain and inability to lose and being at a weight where people treat me all sorts of negative ways (invisible! stupid! no willpower! gross! not worth listening to!). Those messages from others, the lack of respect – it weighs on you as much as the actual body, and makes it so difficult to have a healthy relationship with your own flesh. And when all your efforts to lose weight consistently fail despite your really awesome habits…then your body just equals failure on top of gross/stupid/invisible/worthless, and the cycle gets worse. I’m sick of it. I’m ending the cycle.

My body is my HOME. It’s the only place I have to live. I WILL TREAT IT WITH THE CARE AND RESPECT IT DESERVES.

It’s damn well time for me to stop the fight. I keep telling myself that my efforts to lose weight aren’t related to shame, that they’re just me trying to look like myself again, to make my outside reflect my inside. Fuck that. I have no control over the size of me. My diet is excellent. I have great exercise habits. I’ve repaired my disordered eating habits. I’m rarely sedentary. If weight loss was as easy as eating and exercising well, I’d have this in the bag. But medical issues keep putting up blocks, and until my doctors and I can get to the root of these problems, my body is going to resist change. It’s pointless for me to continue wasting my energy worrying about my size. It’s high time to start spending my energy on other things:

I will continue to eat healthy, making sure to get in a large variety of foods of all kinds, minimizing processed foods and sugar, and also being flexible enough to allow treats and celebrations.

I want my outsides to reflect my insides? Let’s work with that then, regardless of size. Let’s set aside some money in savings to get those tattoos I’ve been putting off for four years because I wanted to wait until I was small again. Let’s slowly acquire a diverse wardrobe of things I love. Let’s not shirk on decent haircuts, and why not have fun with color and design while I’m at it? And you know what? I’m an athlete even if I’m obese, and it’s okay to dress the part – it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about it.

It’s also okay for me to have clothing quirks, and to concede to them. So yeah, I have no problem wearing a swimsuit, not in the least bit uncomfortable, but leggings without a skirt/dress/shorts to cover the crotch area? Not going to happen. I should stop trying to force myself to be comfortable with it when I’m not. Ditto dresses without something underneath them. It’s okay to wear shorts or pants under them if I please, or to skip wearing the dresses altogether. And if I look like a 90s throwback in tank tops and cargo pants, hey it works, and it’s ME.

As I said above, I’m an athlete. There are fitness goals I want to accomplish, and I’m no longer going to put off accomplishing them because of my size. One day I will be able to run a 5K again, and do pull-ups again, and do all those crazy-strong yoga poses like crow and headstands. I will build muscle and endurance, and even if my body stays the same weight or the same size, I will be stronger, more capable, and WAY more confident.

I’m done fighting my body. Now it’s time to fight FOR my body.

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King of Scars, by Leigh Bardugo

Posted on February 25, 2019 by Thistle

Time has passed since the end of the Grisha trilogy and the Six of Crows duology. The country of Ravka has tentative peace, but is still threatened by enemies without and within. King Nicholai is determined to heal his country, but carries a secret that may threaten everything he has planned.

Okay that synopsis is awful but I didn’t want to give anything away that might spoil early volumes in the Grishaverse. This is the first of two books in this particular subset of the series, and it can be read without reading the previous two series, but as you might imagine, the reading is richer if you have. Personally, I haven’t gone back to the original Grisha trilogy since Ruin and Rising released nearly five years ago, because I really disliked the ending of that book/trilogy. I don’t remember as well the events that took place in Ruin and Rising. That left me catching up a little here, trying to make connections, but I had no trouble understanding the story even without memory serving me well.

And despite what I said about disliking the end of the first series, I’ve continued to read and enjoy the books Bardugo has published in the Grishaverse. I like the continuity of characters, the evolution of magic and country and culture over a troubling time in Ravkan history. The story in this book is new, a continuation of lives for several characters I’d grown to love in the past. I really do love to be able to watch as the world keeps moving for beloved characters. The new story itself was interesting and extremely tense in places, and I’m really looking forward to the conclusion of the series when it releases. And I’ll keep my thoughts to those few, because to say more would inevitably wade into spoiler territory.

Posted in 2019, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Sunday Coffee – My Fig Tree

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Thistle

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. … I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

– The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

I first read The Bell Jar in the summer of 1999 when I was twenty years old. There was a lot of the book that I immediately related to, and this quote was no exception. All my life, there were too many things I wanted all pulling me in different directions. A lot of the time, circumstances dictated my path rather than me making my own choices. I spent a lot of my twenties and early thirties waffling between multiple choices and clinging to dreams that 1) were so old that I wasn’t even sure I wanted them any longer, and 2) were fairly impractical even if I did still want them. And with the last five years or so picking apart and erasing a giant chunk of my identity, I’m in a place where I get to start over from scratch and really figure out what comes next. Which means picking a fig.

I turn 40 on Friday. I’ve spent the last fifteen years working as a stay at home mom with one-day intentions of returning to school to complete my degree even though I really don’t want to. There’s only a few years left before my kids are all off to college, and I need to think about the next phase of my life. Everything kinda got put on hold when I had Morrigan at 21, and in the last two decades, I’ve been stuck. It’s time to get unstuck. Few figs are left on that tree, and I’m sick of staring upwards in indecision.

On Wednesday, I had an ah-ha moment. I thought about the ambitions/dreams/plans I had for my life, and what the motivations behind them were. I thought really hard about the realities of those ambitions/dreams/plans. And I had a few personal revelations about what I want to do with the rest of my life. It was like, on the eve of my 40th birthday, I finally realized what I wanted to do when I grew up. I know, in a very general way, what my next steps are. (First one being to make the “general way” more specific!) It’s all knew and exciting/terrifying, and I’m not ready to discuss details publicly yet. But Jason and I are already starting to look into the practicalities of how to move forward, and I have a good idea of how the next two to three years will play out.

I hope to talk more about this soon. In the meantime, I’m just happy to have chosen a fig, and to be moving down a path instead of wandering aimlessly.

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 11 Comments

The Eating Instinct, by Virginia Sole-Smith

Posted on February 22, 2019 by Thistle

Subtitled: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America

When the author’s first child stopped eating as an infant, she had to relearn everything she knew about food and hunger. In researching this, she moved into researching food culture in general. This book explores everything from the alternative food movement to what it’s like to try to eat on a budget restricted to food stamps. It’s not a book about how to eat, but a book about how our culture tells us to eat and gets us all twisted up in knots about the basic necessity of eating.

This was a really, really good sociological and anthropological look at US food culture in general. Sole-Smith did a thorough job with research and reaching out to different populations. For the most part, she kept her own personal biases out of the writing (except when it came to Michael Pollen, who she seemed unable to help skewering whenever possible). The book doesn’t try to be prescriptive, and doesn’t come across as holier-than. It lets people tell their own stories, and attempts to understand all different points of view.

From a personal perspective, I connected to the stories Sole-Smith told about her daughter. While I haven’t experienced a child who will not eat myself, my cousin’s son (born at 25 weeks and in NICU for months) mostly refused to eat until he was in double digits. He had a tube down his throat for the first few months of his life, which caused him to develop a terrible gagging reflex and chronic vomiting. Until he was ten or eleven, he had a feeding tube through his abdomen, and his parents had to learn to let him eat whatever he would eat. So he ate some candy and processed junk food like poptarts, and the rest of my family lamented that he would grow up to have problems with obesity and food addictions etc etc. (Notably, he is going to turn 16 this year, is taller than me, and probably weighs less than 100 lbs he’s so thin – in spite of the fact that he still eats mostly junk food – just very tiny amounts of food generally.) Sole-Smith’s daughter had many of the same issues, and Sole-Smith faced many of the same eating/feeding fears. Her thoughts on them in retrospect were very insightful.

Additionally, I loved so many of the quotes in this book, her insights about food, nutrition, and diet in general. For example:

Nutrition has become a permanently unsolvable Rubik’s Cube. So we read more books, pin more blog posts, buy more products, and sign up for more classes and consultations. And we don’t realize how many of the so-called experts guiding us through this new and constantly changing landscape are…fighting their own battles with food.

And:

Bariatric surgeons are prescribing for fat people what we diagnose as eating disordered in thin people. (Quote from Deb Burgard, Ph.D)

Interestingly, by the end of this book I thought – huh, I should eat like I read: mostly stuff I enjoy, with some nutritious stuff mixed in because it’s good for me; eating more when I’m hungrier, less when I don’t feel like eating much; eating the same thing for weeks on end if I damn well feel like it. And of course, my brain will never let me do this, not while I’m obese and feel the need to eat/be/look healthier. But it’s a nice thought, and perhaps I will get there one day, the same way I did with reading and book-blogging. In the meantime, this was a really fascinating book to read and ponder.

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Wellness Wednesday – Steroids Part 2

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Thistle

It has been a really interesting couple of weeks for me. On the 7th, my doctor prescribed a six-day tapering steroid pack. Initial effects of the pack were phenomenal: all the hives, facial rash, and inflammation disappeared for several days. On the fourth day, I had a massive inflammation attack about an hour after I posted my Sunday Coffee discussing how wonderful the steroids had been. My entire scalp/face, arms, and legs were covered in rash, and I had bad hives break out on my thighs. I have no idea why. I took an Allegra, which helped all the rashes, and after my daily dose of steroids, the hives went away. Clearly, I’m having this inflammation reaction to something more than just the medicinal cocktail the doctor gave me in Dec/Jan. Apparently that cocktail was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

After that first massive outbreak, I’ve been taking allergy meds every morning. I’m scheduled to see an allergist on the 4th. Fingers crossed that 1) he can find the source, and 2) I’m not allergic to cats. Interestingly, watching the inflammation on my face come and go as my body fought it, I realize I’ve been having low-grade inflammatory reaction for years. This picture is from 2013, and what I thought was just normal at the time – my facial skin redder and rawer than the rest of my skin – was actually inflammation. (You can actually see the line on my neck where the inflammation ended!) It was worse on some days (like when I took this picture) and better on others. So probably I’ve been reacting to something for a very long time. I don’t know if that something is a food, a contact allergy, a hormone imbalance, or something else. But I plan to figure it out!

The good thing is that the massive amounts of inflammation seem to be under control, even if I’m still getting a moderate amount of it. I’ve been able to exercise (especially strength train and yoga) without feeling like I’m going to die. I wish I’d gotten this taken care of in early January, because I did NOT enjoy my normal January yoga challenge (Dedicate) at all. I thought it was just because the program was much more strength-heavy, but I now suspect that inflammation was the reason. I suppose when just walking two blocks to check your mail feels like running a marathon, downward dog is going to make you feel like you’re about to collapse, eh? I white-knuckled my way through Dedicate, and now I wonder if a future repetition will be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Notably, I’m also starting to wonder if inflammation is behind all my anosmia/smell issue too. Three days into my steroid treatment, I woke up able to smell things I haven’t been able to smell in over a year – fish, the way the burner on the stove smells when you accidentally burn something on it, oranges, body odor, maple sausage, ammonia, etc. For one day, I could smell nearly everything, and it all smelled normal. The next day, I could smell things still, but the scents were starting to be buried under the distortion again. Each day the steroid treatment got smaller, my ability to smell properly diminished a little more, until it disappeared completely again when the treatment was over. I had my follow-up with the ENT yesterday, and she agreed that inflammation might have something to do with it. She’s ordering specific blood tests to rule out mineral excess/deficiency and a CT scan of my sinuses, but I’m hedging my bets on the allergist.

And if all that wasn’t enough, I had one really great benefit from the steroids that no one but me was expecting. My doctor actually tried to persuade me from the steroid treatment because steroids generally cause people to gain weight. I knew this would not be the case for me. I’d been holding at the same weight for six weeks due to inflammation, and I knew that as soon as my body calmed the f*ck down, my weight would drop significantly. And it did. In the six days of taking steroids, I lost 4 lbs. I dropped to a number on the scale that I haven’t seen since Feb 2017, and which is about half a pound lower than my lowest weight of 2018. And hey, my goal shirt from last summer started to fit!

Unfortunately, it’s been tough in the week since I got off the steroids. As soon as the last dose was out of my system, a lot of my symptoms came back completely or in part. My insomnia flared worse than it’s been in 18 months, and I didn’t sleep – at all – for three nights straight (hence no Sunday Coffee last weekend). My senses of smell and taste went insane before they settled back to where they were pre-steroid. I had rampant hives running down arms, legs, chest, back, and face at random moments, and I still get them occasionally at night. Some days my face feels fine, and others it’s burning and swollen and red. My weight bumped back up immediately (though this very well could be because of the not-sleeping issue, and the eating horribly because of the not-sleeping issue). Clearly all these things are tied to inflammation and a histamine response, possibly to an allergy response, and I don’t even begin to know where to start with diagnosis. Hopefully the allergist will have some good thoughts. I am so sick of all this!! Those few days of being healthy felt SO GOOD and I want that back now please.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Top Ten Lesser-Known Books

Posted on February 19, 2019 by Thistle

I think I’ve done a similar topic to this in the past, but since these lesser-known books get so little attention, I don’t mind spotlighting them again. The full topic for today’s list is “books I loved with fewer than 2,000 ratings on Goodreads,” and my most-rated book on the list clocks in with only 1128 ratings. Here’s my list** from fewest ratings to most:

Players in a Game by Dale Wasserman (2) – I read this play in high school and fell completely in love. I wish more people read this and plays in general.

Native by Mona Kuhn (9) – Ditto really good photography books, like this one.

Wine Isn’t Rocket Science by Ophelie Neiman (54) – This was one of my favorite books of 2017. All about wine without getting too stuffy or technical, in graphic novel format.

Crossed Wires by Rosy Thornton (112) – Really?? Because this book is SOOOOOO good, one of my favorites ever! A beautiful love story with really heavy roots in two different British cultures. (Note: Thornton’s The Tapestry of Love also clocks in with only 246 ratings, which is another travesty!)

Firstborn by Lorie Ann Grover (331) – This is a strange book and it wasn’t marketed widely, but still, it’s really good and I highly recommend it.

Nekropolis by Maureen McHugh (471) – Ditto Firstborn. Now if only I could get my hands on a physical copy of this book for my personal library!

The Elusive Elixer by Gigi Pandian (578) – A cute cozy fantasy mystery that I got off Audible originally for like $3 or something. The whole series is fun and I hope there are more books to come.

Around the World in 80 Diets by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio (788) – Nonfiction, photography, and an interesting cross-cultural look at food…why aren’t more people picking this one up??

The Trouble With Destiny by Lauren Morrill (1116) – I have to say that this one came as a complete surprise and makes me wonder if Goodreads was having trouble with their rating system when I sorted my books. Lauren Morrill is a fairly popular YA novelist with a fairly large following as far as I can tell, and this book was excellent. It’s possible it doesn’t really belong on this list because I have a feeling it really has more than the 1116 ratings Goodreads showed me…

Song of Blood and Stone by L. Penelope (1128) – I just read this one last month! It’s a good one and I hope that the number of readers continues to climb since it’s relatively new!

**Excluded from the list: second titles by the same author, sequels of books that had many ratings (since sequels usually don’t have as many as the first), children’s picture books (not a lot of ratings for those on GR), and classics that have many editions with different ratings plus they’re classics and don’t really need a lot of spotlighting!

topten

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged | 4 Comments

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton

Posted on February 18, 2019 by Thistle

From the book flap: Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others…

Bryan from Still an Unfinished Person brought this book to my attention. It’s a sort of Groundhog Day meets Quantum Leap mashup, with a lot of philosophy about what it means to be yourself mixed in. Aiden Bishop has eight hosts to solve a murder, a race against time in a day repeated eight times, starting with no memory at all at the beginning of the first host’s day, but carrying over into the next, then the next, then the next. Some of the days weave in and out of the book, making a lot of the story a bit of a loop with clues scattered throughout previous days. That made the mystery just about impossible to unravel ahead of time (nice!) and made me want to go back and reread to spot all the different things I’d missed. I have yet to do so, because it’s also a ponderous kind of book, a bit slow (in a good way), which means I want to give it some time to really percolate before revisiting.

Irony: In most thriller/mysteries, I lament the current trend toward extra unnecessary twists. In this book, I was expecting more twists at the end, and felt that the ending/solution/explanations were a bit too simple for me. Heh. However, I’m pretty sure I won’t feel the same about the ending on second read. This is the sort of book that gets more satisfying with a deeper reading, and the ending – while too simple on first read for me – will be thicker and more meaningful once I’ve read past all the actual plot sections to the more philosophical sections. I look forward to that.

I don’t want to say more because there would be way too many ways to accidentally say too much and take some of the magic of discovery out of the novel’s unfolding. Even the book flap and GoodReads descriptions really say too much. I don’t usually care too much myself about spoilers, but this is a fun one to unravel, so I recommend going into it as blind as possible.

Posted in 2019, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

11 Facts for 11 Years

Posted on February 15, 2019 by Thistle

Eleven years ago today, I wrote my first book review. My first blog was born. I’ve changed blogs several times since then, but have carried those reviews along with me ever since, and I still celebrate Feb 15th as my blogoversary. I thought I’d so something a little different to celebrate today, and offer 11 facts-about-the-blogger to celebrate 11 years of blogging.

1. I’m an extrovert reader with situational social anxiety. I love people. I love meeting new people and seeing old friends and just being out among people. However, I do not like new situations and new places. I don’t like noise chaos (especially created by children/babies) or changing-plans chaos. I like things organized, planned, and routine (I am obsessed with spreadsheets, y’all), and I definitely need time to decompress alone when I get knocked off center. So yes, I have social anxiety any time it comes to going to places I don’t know, or going into situations where I’m not sure of the dress or etiquette (or even the parking situation), but I absolutely love being around people and getting to know new people/places/things in the right (ie safe) setting.

2. I didn’t read much as a teenager. Unfortunately, my parents and librarians could only introduce me to formulaic genre fiction, often too young or too old for me, and at school I only got classics that were inappropriate for teenage audiences. (Inappropriate meaning they weren’t really relatable to teens, thus didn’t make for engaging reads.) For many years, I mourned the fact that there weren’t books out there that worked for me. It took until I was in my 20s to connect with books again, and until my 30s before I connected with modern fiction (instead of classics).

3. I never finished college, and frankly, I have no desire to go back to school. I was good at school, but it bored me to tears 90% of the time. This probably has a lot to do with where I went to school and the fact that I’ve never yet decided what I want to do in life beyond raising my family and writing. I know I need to go back to school and get a real career in a few years, but I dread this. Literally dread. I have recurring nightmares about going back to school. I love learning, but I really dislike the traditional school setting.

(2007)

4. Speaking of raising a family, I spent my entire childhood and adolescence dreaming about getting married and having children. But after I had kids, I discovered that I don’t actually like kids or being a parent. Go figure. Plus I have a very complicated relationship with being a stay-at-home-mom, which I never wanted to be. It’s important to me to have someone home with the kids, but I grew up taking care of my younger siblings while my parents worked to keep us fed, so I feel like I’ve been taking care of children since I was ten years old and have never done anything else with my life.

5. I cannot wait to be in my 40s. Probably this has a lot to do with the fact that my children will all be in college by the time I’m 44, but it’s also because I’ve never dreaded that magical number 40 like other people. I’ve felt 40 years old my entire life, and it’s going to be awesome to actually be 40 when I feel 40 for once. Just two weeks to go! And then, who knows? Maybe after I pass the 40-year mark, I’ll start feeling younger than my actual age rather than older. Maybe I’ll feel 40 when I’m 60! Might happen. I felt 40 when I was 20, after all.

6. Y’all already know I’m a crazy cat lady. However, I only became one very, very recently. I grew up with way too many pets. By “way too many,” I mean we once had thirteen pets in a 1000-square-foot house, in addition to five humans. (They weren’t all cats – we had cats, dogs, birds, fish, guinea pigs, a rabbit, and a hedgehog.) By the time I left home, I never wanted another pet in my life. When 2009 came along, we ended up getting two cats because Jason wanted a cat badly. (He won’t admit this now, but it’s true. It wasn’t something I would have done for myself.) For a few years, I didn’t even like having a cat (the second kitty passed away after six months from cancer). But then I came to love cats, and now five of them live with me…

7. I have what’s known as a super-taster gene, passed down from my dad’s side of the family. Taste is my best sense (or at least it was before the distorted sense issue of the last year, but I’m still hopeful that can be resolved!). I can taste how many days away milk will expire. If iceberg lettuce has ever touched my food, I can taste it. And if a taste is too strong, it’s like a sensory overload and I won’t be able to taste anything at all. Example: my grandmother once gave my cousins and me some dill pickles that she’d accidentally pickled for 15 years. While everyone else was doubled over with the sourness of them, I couldn’t taste them. It was like eating solid water. Coffee was the same. Until a few years ago, it just tasted like hot water.

8. I didn’t begin drinking alcohol or coffee until I was 34 years old. Up until that point, coffee didn’t taste like anything and alcohol tasted strongly of rot (not in a good way). I think all my work with food (expanding what I could eat through force) in 2011 and 2012 made a change in the way my super-taster tastebuds functioned, or perhaps they just dulled with age. Either way, I could suddenly taste coffee, and wine no longer tasted like death. Now whether or not taking up these two habits was a good thing is debatable…

9. I dislike nearly all fruits and vegetables, and what I do like, I only like under specific conditions. With fruits, it’s mostly a sensory thing (plus they’re often way too sweet). I have a hereditary neurological condition (sensory processing disorder) that could have been corrected with occupational therapy in toddlerhood if I’d been diagnosed, but doctors didn’t even know the disorder existed at the time. (My middle son has it, and he had the occupational therapy, whew!) The texture of fruits is unbearable. With vegetables, it’s the taste thing. Like I said above, everything tastes much stronger, and the bitter flavor of most vegetables is overwhelming. Iceberg lettuce is one of the strongest, nastiest flavors I’ve ever encountered, and many people say it has no taste! Because of these strong dislikes, I rarely ate any produce growing up, and even less in adulthood. I only started putting major effort into eating more in 2011, when I started small (one serving per day, six days a week) and worked forced my way up.

10. I enjoy doing laundry. I don’t know why. Most chores I don’t particularly like, and I downright loathe cooking (which is why Jason does it). Laundry doesn’t bother me, though. I do it twice a week no matter what and I don’t let anyone do it for me. Now, I don’t fold anyone’s clothes except my own (my teen boys are well old enough to do their own!) but even when I did, I didn’t mind. However, I only found this zen in laundry after I stopped sorting loads before washing. Growing up, I had to sort the entire family’s laundry into whites, darks, reds, jeans, purples, towels, delicates, etc. About a year after I began staying home with the boys, I said to hell with it and just started throwing everything in together. And you know what? It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to the clothes. Life just became a whole lot less complicated. Also, I love my dryer. We didn’t have one growing up, and line-dried clothes are the worst things ever. I don’t even like indoor-drying clothes that can’t go in the dryer. Dryers are the best.

11. I’ve had a “cow-pillow” since I was a senior in high school. I was never a fan of cows and I didn’t use any kind of chest/stomach/body pillow back then, but my boyfriend at the time liked both. I found this ridiculous cow-print handkerchief and made it into a pillow for him. The foam I stuffed it with smelled AWFUL though, so for a week before I gave it to him, I used it as a body pillow to try to negate the smell. (That didn’t really work, notably.) After using it for a week, I was hooked. I bought another cow-print handkerchief and made my own pillow. Only then, I left my pillow in a hotel in France while studying abroad when I was 20. Later that summer, I was in Ohio for my dad’s wedding and found the exact same cow-print handkerchief in a five-and-dime store. !!! I made myself a new one. A few years later, I bought a pack of 24 identical cow-print handkerchiefs off ebay. Now, I make myself a new cow-pillow every couple years as the previous ones get old and smelly and lumpy and flat. I even made one for Laurence once at his request. I shall never be without my cow-pillow!!

So there you go. Eleven facts about the blogger, some I’ve discussed here before and others that are new. Hope you are all enjoying your day. Thanks for reading all these years!!

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 5 Comments

Wellness Wednesday – 100 Days

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Thistle

On my birthday last year, I made a list of 40 things I wanted to accomplish before I turned 40 (March 1st). I have a few weeks left and there are a few of those goals that I either failed or abandoned (impossible to complete before the deadline), but I’ve completed the majority of items on that list. Of the eight that are left, two of the really big ones will be complete today: go 100 days without a binge, and go 100 days without any alcohol.**

Binging
This is not the first time I’ve gotten close to that 100-day mark in the last year. During the summer, I’d gone 93 days without a binge before anxiety took over. It was only a small binge (half a bag of popcorn and two cookies), but the mentality of a binge was there nonetheless, and I started the clock over. I tend to binge when I’m having a lot of anxiety, particularly if I don’t know the root of that anxiety (which makes me even more anxious). I’ve worked really hard over the last year to try to get this habit in check. I wasn’t a binge-eater before life fell apart in 2014, and I’d like to minimize this destructive disorderly eating as much as possible. Since my last birthday, I’ve only binged on 11 days. Several of those were in-a-row days, and so if I combine those into one long uber-binge, that cuts down to only 8 binges. Today is Day 100 of my current streak, and I plan to continue that streak as long as possible. I’m trying to teach myself longterm habits to handle and deal with binge-inducing emotions without attacking my body with food.

Alcohol
My reasons for trying to go without alcohol for 100 days straight were twofold. First, I’d noticed that I tend to eat a lot more when I drink alcohol, especially wine. This is true even if I drink only a small amount. Looking at the situation from a bodily perspective, I’d guess this is my body’s way of protecting me from dehydration and all those hangover-like effects of alcohol. Notably, I’ve never had a hangover. Even when I’ve been smashing drunk, I’ve had no hangover, probably because I tend to eat a ton of food and drink lots of water at the same time that I drink. The only times I don’t overeat while drinking alcohol are when I haven’t had anything to drink in awhile and I’m in a social dinner situation (having a glass of wine at my dad’s house or out at a restaurant with family, for instance).

Second, I seem to hold onto weight for weeks after drinking, and I wanted to see if going for a long period of time without alcohol would help me lose weight. A couple times over the last year, I went 35-40 days without any alcohol and that did seem to help me with weight loss. However, the effectiveness seems to diminish after about a month, as far as I can tell with so little data. The effects of a glass of wine on rare occasions don’t seem to undo  or stop weight loss, either – only if I’m having alcohol regularly or in large quantities. This makes sense given the bodily self-protection mode I discussed above. So I’m going to continue to abstain from alcohol today, on my day 100, but tomorrow I’ll have a glass of wine when Jason and I go out for Valentine’s day. Afterwards, I’ll just keep that to the very occasional glass on special gatherings and cut completely again if my weight starts to suffer.

**Note: Despite these two goals beginning/ending on the same day, the two don’t always go hand-in-hand. Last summer, for instance, I went 93 days without binging despite alcohol being a regular part of my diet. I just happened to have my last binge on a day that also included alcohol.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Top Ten Couples

Posted on February 12, 2019 by Thistle

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic asks about our favorite couples in books. I decided to go with traditional couples this time around and picked the first ten that popped into my head (that I loved, of course!). In order of which I thought first:

1. Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte from Possession by AS Byatt
Their relationship grew through letters! We named our first two cats after these two. Christabel passed away of lymphoma after six months, but Ash is still with us.

(Hi, Christabel!)

2. Vin and Elend from the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson
There’s this one scene I love so much: Vin is joyous and hugging Elend, wearing nothing but underclothes despite being in public (long story), and he’s uncomfortable and telling her that this whole hugging-in-underclothes thing is making him feel very awkward. Ha!

3. Jane and Rochester from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Of course!!

4. Zuzana and Mik from the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series by Laini Taylor
Reading their first-date story in Night of Cake and Puppets was equally awesome.

5. Lazlo and Sarai from Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor
Oh to meet in dreams…

6. Sophie and Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Of course!!

7 & 8. Blue and Gansey // Adam and Ronan from the Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater
I cannot wait to read more about these characters! Ronan-trilogy coming in November!!!!!

9. Nazira and Fatima from the Conqueror’s Saga by Kiersten White
They may not be main characters, but their relationship is so awesome. Love it.

10. Celia and Marco from The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
I love their story more each time I read this book.

Who are some of your favorite couples in literature?

topten

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , | 6 Comments