Baseline

 I'm excited about starting on the meds experiment! I think it's worthwhile to capture the baseline from which I hope to change. Of course, I've got the data!

 

Horizontal grid shows 10-pound differences. 
The blue line was my ideal weight, briefly achieved twice. 
The red line was my stable point after I started blogging, until I blew it.

Look at the picture of my weight loss history, starting back when I was a 35-year-old little girl going to Weight Watchers in a church basement for the first time. (You might need to go landscape on your phone.) The first Big Loss, more than 40 pounds at age 43, was done so easily. I followed, mostly, the Carbohydrate Addict's diet - very low carb most of the time, but not full Atkins. The second big loss, in perimenopause as I started this blog in 2010, was harder, but was pretty much the same eating pattern. Then, for several years, I white knuckled keeping the weight in bounds. I was in some of the best shape of my life, as I decided hitting "goal" was worth anything, I did - for a couple of days. Again, pretty much the same eating, more Atkins than not. Then, the classic rebound, and then I threw every habit and guideline out the window to go intuitive. I tuned in to myself, and myself wanted bread and pasta and ice cream. Since then, I've been trying to wrestle my weight back down, and things that used to work either don't work anymore or somehow have become too hard.

So here I am, relatively stable at a peak weight that I hate. It's about moving, and feeling, and spending so much time thinking about it. It's about needing bigger pants. 

Here is a zoom in to the last 3+ years.

Weight from 2022 to present.
Green line is short term goal.

My weight has bounced around in a 5-pound range, hitting the highest weight ever a couple of times. I've done some attempts at weight loss. Some were minor-ly successful, until they weren't. Each required phenomenal amounts of focus and concentration. I'm just tired.

As part of my "baseline" prep, I've also measured myself with a tape measure. Again, I've got some history on this, and yeah, I'm bigger than ever. 

My scale also purports to measure body composition in terms of muscle versus fat. These measurements are notoriously inaccurate, except when looking at trends. So I'll be keeping an eye on that, as well. Over the time I've had this scale, less time than shown on the graph above, it hasn't varied significantly. It will take a big change to show up, and that will be with a lot water-weight driven noise. 

I believe I've got about a decade to do some adventurous things I want to do, and this is the decade to give it a shot. Here's hoping the meds help me get there and do the things I want to do.

**TRIGGER WARNING** **TRIGGER WARNING** **TRIGGER WARNING** **TRIGGER WARNING**

I have been very lucky in my life. I have not had any trauma specifically affecting me, my body, my direct life. No major injuries, no sudden job loss, only the kind of minor sexual assault every girl experiences (and, apparently, the President of Mexico). A residual fear of crowds and mobs that makes me cautious about going to protests or even festivals. And of course I shared the deep national trauma of 9/11, in a fairly personal way.

But people I love have had unexpected sudden death or catastrophic injuries.  And, while all of those deeply affected me emotionally at the time (and in retrospect), only a few had immediate direct impact on my daily life. Those are the ones that still grab me, hold me, come up unexpectedly and punch me in my nose. 

When  I was in grad school, in 1980, one of my dearest friends was murdered on her doorstep on a Saturday night. Horrible, but it got worse. There appeared to be a serial killer abroad. Or, perhaps it was someone I knew. My roommates and friends and I were interviewed, fingerprinted (for exclusion purposes they said, we had been in her apartment and driven her car), and interviewed again and again. We supported her family, my first personal experience of dealing with the mundane aftermath of death, packing up her things, organizing a memorial service. My grades plummeted. Three out of four semesters in the top 10% of my class, one semester barely getting by.  For the better part of a year, I didn't sleep the whole night through, but existed in a kind of split shift. Bed early, up after midnight for hours doing school work, back to bed as the sun came up. I graduated, left town with no resolution of who done it, and life moved on and into a more normal pattern.

A couple of years later, I was living in Ohio, and sleeping at my boyfriend's house. I was drifting off as he watched the 11 o'clock news in the bedroom. Suddenly, I jerked awake as I heard "authorities say the suspect may have been responsible for a string of murders of women in Michigan and Texas". Just that. I was too late to hear more, but I lay rigidly awake all that night. The next night, I was again drifting off when my boyfriend came into the bedroom. I jerked awake, and all I knew was I wasn't dreaming, there was actually someone there, not my imagination. I screamed! I shrieked enough and so loud that the neighbors all turned on their lights and checked  their yards. I quickly settled, but it was the start of another long spell of sleep disrupted nights. The following day, my phone rang. My old roommate in Ann Arbor said, "Yes, they've got him."

From time to time I've toyed with the idea of writing in more detail about this, and I thought that maybe now, in my old age, it was time. Maybe pushed by finishing a novel that dealt with the aftermath of trauma, I thought about it for a while this morning. Write about my friend and our friendship, and our circle of friends. Recount the immediate events, maybe look at my shelf of journals to find what I wrote at the time, make it clear finally -- not the resolution, there can never be that -- but who killed her and what happened to him. Tell it as a story. Put a bow on it. Be sure others know about her and what happened. Thinking about it, I wondered if there was a picture of my friend on the web. I was curious if I could find details of her family, wondering how they had gotten on. 

I was startled to find a recent (this year) documentary about the killer. I didn't read enough to find out if the whole series was about him, or just the episode. With shaking fingers, I bookmarked the site, and closed the tab so I wouldn't stumble on it accidentally. I was gasping for breath. Panicking. 

I fell back on my mindfulness training: Just breathe. Close your eyes and feel the breath. Let feeling the breath fill your mind. What does it feel like? Where do you feel it? Just sit with it, inhabit it. After a few moments, feeling calmer, try visiting the emotions that drove this panic. Let the emotion come. You are safe. You are in a safe place. Feel what you feel. How does it actually feel? Can you name your feelings? Where do you feel them? Just sit with it. Don't push it away, but let it come. You'll be fine, because you are really safe. If it's too much, return to the breath. You are fine. You are safe. You are sad, but that's ok. You are fine. As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong. Just breathe.

This has been the hardest thing for me, actually allowing myself to feel my feelings. Not just now, but for years. My brief foray into therapy with a mindfulness twist let me finally get there.

The unexpected reminder of trauma is traumatic. Trigger warnings are a real and necessary thing. As "woke" becomes an object of scorn (not among you, my dear readers, I know) so have trigger warnings been subject to derision. But finding a level of detail and images about my friend set me off today, even though I initiated the search. It's taken me three hours to write this, with breaks for walking around and dipping into more breath meditation. I'm pissed at how much I'm blowing my nose, when I thought I was almost done with my head cold of this week. But I felt a need to capture this moment, not to just move on.

I may write more about this. But I'll do it with plenty of warnings for myself in place. It'll be some work, not just the writing of my own thoughts, but having to do research to ground my memories in facts. Something to tackle gradually, not all at once.

But today will be a fine day. I have several projects planned, and a neighborhood get together to cap it off. Excelsior! 

 

Stronger Next Year

My gym! Rowing machine along the back.
I just installed the bar to help with balance exercises.

I did not have a great year physically. It started with recovering from my knee surgery, carried on through a summer of increased migraines and still not up to snuff on my knees, and crashed and burned as a result of my vigorous (but fun!) sailing vacation, where I injured my rotator cuff and generally burned out my whole body.

Through it all I tried to keep moving and working out in my basement gym. (I love my basement gym, and I enjoy working with my personal trainer there.) But there were definitely days on the couch where I hardly left the house. I felt old. I felt feeble. I was fat, and nothing I did seemed to affect that. I woke every morning feeling like the Old Red Woman, bent over, stiff, wobbly, and in pain. I felt frustrated that my body was so frail. I was preparing myself for a new reality of being old and feeble. I told myself that I actually was old, almost seventy years old. Any time there was a news article that another celebrity had died, the first thing I did was check their age. So many of them younger than me!

But by late fall, I felt myself getting better. Stronger. More capable. Actually doing things. Feeling competent and capable. Walking still did not feel good, but I adjusted and spent more time in my home gym working with weights or my rowing machine or on the stationary bike my BIL gave me. I went back to the mental disciplines I had learned over the years of dealing with pain, meditating and observing the pain with kind curiosity. I had some adventures, on the water and on the scoot. I had some actual good days, where I woke up feeling good. Not stiff. Not bent over. Not feeble. Ready to face the day, get out there and do things.

The election results hit me like a gut punch. As I got out of bed the following morning, I was initially fine, but by the time I had walked the length of the house to let the dogs out, my back had tightened into a full fledged spasm. SPROING! I was bent over, leaning on furniture like a toddler doing her first cruise around the house. I pulled out my tool kit, things I know, deep down in my body and mind, to be true. First, mentally: "there is nothing wrong with you. You are safe. You are fine. Yes, the back is clenched, but it's not broken. Yes, the world has gone to shit, but you are safe. Your body is safe." Then I started my series of exercises/ stretches that I know deep down are going to help. I also reached for the tylenol, because comfort is an important part of feeling safe. 

This worked! It took a couple of weeks - the back clenched every morning for a while - but it got fainter, and gradually went away.

Around this same time, my primary care doctor told me that based on my testing, I have great lung capacity and a strong heart, but I have shit endurance. She prescribed aerobic exercise, specific amounts at specific heart rate levels of effort. The next week, my neurologist reinforced this - certain levels of aerobic exercise seem to have a protective effect on migraines.

The view my trainer has from my phone while we video.
I have all the toys! I bought my first weights in 1995,
and I've been adding equipment ever since.

So I'm all in on the cardio now, added to my twice-weekly strength training and daily warm up stretches. I have the devices to keep me going indoors this winter- a rowing machine, a (bottom-of-the-line no bells-or-whistles) stationary bike. I have a mini trampoline in front of my TV. And I dusted off my original, built of wood in Minnesota, Nordic Track ski machine from 1993! Using the NT was the first time in my life I enjoyed indoor cardio, back in the day. It needs refurbishment, but it turns out that while the old ski machines are no longer made, there are enthusiasts and through a sub-reddit I found a guy who sells refurbishment kits with the most common replaceable parts! It's on my list to get it fixed up - probably a few hours work.

I found that walking can't get my heart rate up high enough to meet my PCP's exercise prescription. I try hustling along, but the heart stays stubbornly beating slowly. Only up very steep hills does it go up- and I can't currently sustain that for long enough. This all may change as I get more aerobically fit.

Report Card

 The last time I published a report card was in January of last year, looking at 2022. I actually have kept up tracking myself primarily through apps and devices, and from time to time I sit down and go through the data trying to glean some meaning or insights. I haven't felt like I've learned that much recently, certainly not something worth sharing. I still haven't got any wisdom to share, and it's not that pretty a picture, but the data is what the data is, and there is a certain value in simply showing it. Keeps me honest with myself.

First, to get it out of the way, my weight is high and stable. No need to share a graph. I gained a bunch of weight in 2022 (Fuck You, Intuitive Eating!) and it's stayed on. I haven't been motivated to any kind of a big push to change it. And it's been remarkably stable - plus or minus four pounds. I do plan and track my food most days, but it's more part of planning how to spend my time than trying to morph it into fewer calories. And then, keeping me conscious of what I'm doing, to do away with mindless eating. I still weigh myself every day and it gets recorded on the internet, for whenever I feel like reviewing the history in detail. I chuckled one day recently when I got up and peed several times during the night and found the next morning I was two and a half pounds down from the day before! That's why I can't get excited about day-to-day fluctuations, the range I'm seeing is just water weight. 

First up: Activity. As always, darker is better. January was knee recovery time, and I give myself a pass for everything but workout days. My "workout days" focus on functional fitness, either in my home gym or with physical therapy (my PT experience the past couple of years has been a solid hour of working out followed by 15 minutes of massage and stretching). With PT from the knee replacement added to working out in the home gym, I was really doing a lot. It also paid off, as now my calories and steps are back to where they were last year (which was NOT a stellar year for activity, I admit). The walking mileage shown here is from taking a deliberate walk where I activate my GPS, not an accumulation of steps during the day. I'm currently pretty active in the house and garden, which keeps my steps up, but I haven't been feeling the walk as a way to spend time (and I only do short and slow training walks with the dog, not worth tracking.) I've added a new row since the last time I posted, "stand time". My apple watch tracks this - how much time do I spend on my feet all day. It seems worth looking at, since my goals involve being less sedentary. Here, I'm moving in the right direction!

Next, some health parameters. These are both controllable and uncontrollable things. The big worrying trend is migraines, which are up. I have fallen off the meditation bandwagon, and that might be a contributing factor. But my doctor thinks that perhaps allergies are acting up - and there is a connection between respiratory inflammation and migraines. So I'm trying to be more faithful on OTC allergy remedies. "Alone days" (still looking for a better descriptor) are days I don't talk to anyone. I might be texting or emailing, but it only counts if I talk to someone either in person or on the phone. I really enjoy days on my own, but I am aware it is not healthy to have too many. And besides, I enjoy my family, friends and neighbors! I continue to be a sleep champion, with a normal seasonal variation of less sleep with longer daylight hours. (These sleep hours are separate from time in bed, as the watch purports to distinguish between lying awake versus truly asleep. I am awake at least 45 minutes during the course of the night - but apparently, that is less than average for a woman my age.) Heart rate variability is meant to be an overall measure of stress, with a high number being better. I haven't been looking too much at it, but the apple watch keeps track, so I decided to add it to the list. Resting heart rate, as a reminder, measures resiliency, with a lower number better.

Lastly, how do I spend my leisure time? (Ok, it's all leisure time. I do a minor amount of volunteer work, but I'm not tracking that here.) This whole category is not necessarily "more is better", but it is what it is. I also struggle with whether the "year" column should show an average of the months, or a cumulative total for the year. It's currently a mixed bag. I've actually wanted to read fewer books this year, because I read a lot of fluffy entertainment and it gets in the way of doing more productive things. My TV watching is up recently, as I indulged myself with a season of my only reality TV show, "Below Decks". I haven't been watching movies, neither at home nor out. I have been traveling a modest amount this year, more shorter trips, which is suiting me right now. And I'm hoping for more sailing, as my partner has retired, which multiplies the number of possibilities of aligning our two schedules and the weather.

So that's the story in numbers. Looking at this does motivate me to move, so I'm off to do that now.

Excelsior!

The Home of my Heart

I've lived a number of places in the world, and visited many more, but Bellport will always be the home of my heart. My family lived there when I was born, but we moved to the middle of the country when I was five. We returned for many long summer visits, and Bellport grew in my mind as the aquatic marine summer paradise place I longed to be all the time. We moved back permanently as I started high school, and the acquisition of a sailboat cemented the deal. My high school years were not particularly happy and there certainly is not enough money in the world to ever convince me to relive them. It was the sixties, and traumas both political and personal were significant. But the place I lived was much of what made those years bearable.

I come from a family of great indoors people. Touring the great capitals of the world was their idea of an ideal vacation. My parents were profoundly bored by the beach, we never once went camping, and the idea of scrambling around a little sailboat buffeted by wind and waves was anathema to them. The year we moved back to Bellport, my mother wrote in her Christmas letter how sad we all were to leave the delights of a college town in the midwest. She clearly never checked in with me, her middle child, to find out how I felt about it.

Carmen's River, where we sailed

Bellport gave me the freedom to go places and do things as an adolescent I couldn't have done in many other places. It was a small rural and prosperous town back then, with some summer people, but not with ostentatious wealth or fashion. Alone or with friends, I could bike through small roads and over a bridge to the beach on Fire Island. On weekends, we would go birdwatching with some avid adult birders, hanging out in marshes and on beaches throughout the east end of Long Island. Even more delightfully, my friends and I could sail to Fire Island, or other destinations along the Great South Bay, one of the best small boat sailing areas in the world. It has the steady and strong ocean breeze, but very sheltered water so no big waves. Even better, at least half the area of the Bay is so shallow that if a boat capsizes you can stand on the bottom to right it! Astonishing to me now, my friends and I were allowed to take a family small sailboat each summer for up to week, cruising along the Bay and tying up to shore at night. Our boats were completely open with no toilet or cooking facilities aboard, but the Fire Island National Seashore provided docks to tie up to and places to put a small campstove for cooking. Generally there were also payphones, and we tried to remember to call in each night to assure them we were still alive.

I left to go to college (in the midwest, ironically) in 1972. I never spent a whole summer back in Bellport afterwards. But my family was dug in there, until my mother moved down near me in DC in 2006. Even then, she and I would go back for visits, once or twice a year, until about ten years ago when we went back for the funeral of one of her best friends. Her declining health and declining pool of friends decided against any more trips.

So it was a lovely surprise when I got an invitation to the eightieth birthday party for one of my close friends there, and realized the calendar was free and I really wanted to go. The birthday girl was also a close friend of J, my boat partner who was my friend in high school, and who actually moved back to Bellport (well, ok, Brookhaven, a mere hamlet to Bellport's village) as an adult for about a decade. She decided to come as well - she hadn't been back in nearly 30 years!

The Birthday Girl, Jo, is about a dozen years older than me. That was perfect when I was in high school. I think every adolescent can benefit from adult friends to show alternative ways to be in the world, something different from the parents. Jo and her husband, Phil, provided a safe place to hang out, drop in, drink tea, and sometimes meet other kids from the next town over where Phil was a teacher.

The beach

We had an uneventful but tedious nearly seven hour drive up to the island on Friday. We went directly to Smith Point beach on Fire Island, as Friday had the best weather forecast of the weekend. One of our objectives for the weekend was to walk along the beach to where Superstorm Sandy had made a breach in Fire Island, letting the ocean in directly to the Bay. The breach has since filled in with sand, on all but the highest of high tides. It was a bit of a hike - 4 1/2 miles round trip - but we took our time and watched some birds and stood in the very low spot where the ocean had been washing over the sand. We had spent many many hours in roughly the same spot, and sailing over the waters of the bay just inside the barrier beach, so it was fun to spot landmarks on the far shore. Many of them were just the same.

We stayed in a bargain Airbnb just outside Bellport. I think we may have been the fourth set of guests to stay there - we were the fourth folks to review it, anyway. It was very clean and very basic. I would guess the owner had done the work himself (or hired a friend) because it was not skillful work. There was no weather stripping on the outside door, and when the wind blew the puffs came in. There were stripes of wall paint on the ceiling where the taping wasn't sufficient. There was no book of instructions or local area tips. It had a fancy coffee machine, ground coffee and mugs, but no sugar or cream. The fridge was entirely empty. No ironing board, no hair dryer, sparse furniture. But comfy bed, plenty of bedlinens and towels, a decent shower. It did the job. We left some suggestions on the private feedback, and stressed the positive on the public review.

Friday night, we ate at the fancy Bellport Restaurant. We had no reservation, and we were shuttled to a back room, away from the hopping main part where very attractive people were socializing between tables and the bar. But we asked our server to let the head chef know we were there (using the first names we used back in the day which is not how we are now known to friends). The head chef is the son of the birthday girl, and we used to change his diapers! He came out, astounded, as his sister the party organizer had elected to keep our attendance a secret. So we got excellent food and service and a discount on the drinks. It was fun to see him as an adult in his element - the last time J had seen him, he was babysitting her children! 

Saturday was kind of drizzly, but we made a pilgrimage out to see my mother's building. Back in the year 2000, a local health center was renamed in her honor. I wouldn't have been surprised to see it renamed or even the whole building repurposed, because it's been twenty-five years. I was really touched to find it is not only still a community health center, but even though it's under new management and has a new name, they kept the "Marilyn Shellabarger". 

It's still her building!

 

We took another hike, through a wildlife refuge and along a marsh, seeing more birds and wildlife. We also visited all of our former houses and favorite places in a driving tour, commenting on the changes, not always favorably. Highly enjoyable!

The birthday party was fun! Jo has many many health challenges running back over many years, but she is still gutsy and independent and sharp and funny. Of course, the food was excellent, because not only is her son a fancy chef, but her daughter is a professional baker. There were not lots of people there, but an unexpected treat were the couple who lived behind my parents' house. Also eighty years old, they had sold their house last year and moved back to their old neighborhood on the upper west side, and driven out for the weekend. They were both very bent over and walked very slowly with canes. Also still sharp and funny and highly opinionated, I enjoyed talking to them both. 

Sunday morning we got up early, hit a diner for breakfast, and were off the island and to the NJ turnpike by 9 am. The trip home was uneventful, and a full 90 minutes shorter than the trip up.

I don't know that I will ever go back to Bellport. Jo and her family are my only people links to the place. Being there, I feel both at home and a stranger. I go to a familiar place, but nobody knows me and knows that I belong there, though I feel strongly that I do. The first time I played the game of "what will I do if I win the mega-lottery?" the first thing that popped up was "buy a place in Bellport". But that's really the only way it would happen. 

Maybe it's better to just keep it in my heart, and not allow myself to be disappointed by any inconvenient realities.

What Have I Learned From 35 Years of Tracking My Weight

Would I like to lose weight? Yes.

Will I lose weight? Maybe.

Look at this picture (if you are on a phone turn it sideways):

The horizontal grid lines are ten pounds apart.
The blue line was my goal weight for most of this time period.
The red line is a place I'd be happy to be now.

This is the last 35 years of my life, as told by my weight. Key on the numbers:

1. 1988: I join weight watchers for the first time, at age 33. The weight I was then is a weight I would love to be now!
   
2. 1997: I move from Chicago to DC for a major career change, the same week my father dies. After about a year settling in, I buckle down and lose weight.
   
3. 2008: My sister dies unexpectedly, resulting in a major lifestyle change as I become a parent in the midst of grief.
   
4. 2010: I start this blog, determined to gain control over at least the physical parts of my life as life with grief-stricken adolescents remains chaotic. I de-emphasize work.
   
5. 2019: I retire, which blows up every habit I ever had. And then the pandemic strikes.
   
6. 2022: I embrace "intuitive eating", buying and eating whatever I want whenever I want.
   

Why do I keep coming back to this picture? Am I just wallowing in fact that my current weight is right up at my all time peak from 25 years ago? What can I learn by looking at this history, enriched with other stories of my life? Memories are faulty, but here my actual weight is recorded accurately. Looking back over this blog has also been helpful, to color in what was going on in my life during the ups and downs recorded on the graph. Here are some tidbits I've gleaned from anchoring my other memories in the truth of my weight:

• Losing a lot of weight for me is likely to happen relatively quickly, if at all.
• Not paying attention to what I eat and what I weigh means I'll gain weight.
• Each significant weight loss involved eating low carb a lot of the time, not eliminating sweets entirely, and never choosing low-calorie formulations of real food but instead cooking and eating more vegetables and meat from scratch.
• Each significant weight loss required a great deal of attention and focus, taking up bandwidth in my life.
  
• Each weight loss period was also associated with increased exercise and conscious activity levels.
  

How might I turn the above information into actual weight loss? Do I have the motivation and interest to focus on this? Stay tuned, I guess, because I don't know the answer yet.

Cleveland Going Dark

 In the paper this week there was a headline: Book now for next year's total eclipse! 

It wasn't an advertisement, it was an article about the total eclipse of the sun that will pass in a great diagonal line across much of the United States on April 8, 2024. People are already making plans to be in the path of the totality. Prominently mentioned was how Cleveland would be a prime viewing spot. I've been in the path of many partial eclipses in my time, but never a totality, and given I may not have a lot of other opportunities, I decided to seize the day and go for it. 

During a partial eclipse, small openings
for sunlight show the progress of the eclipse.
The effect through dappled leaves is dazzling!
Each crescent is replicating the eclipse.

It turns out a lot of downtown Cleveland hotels were already sold out, so I checked into AirBnbs. There weren't so many downtown locations available, but there was a cluster on the western border of Cleveland near the lake. As it turns out, that is exactly where I lived, once upon a time. Somehow, I was more comfortable going for the neighborhood I knew a little - even if it was 40 years ago - than picking any other place at random. I ended up booking a whole house - two bedrooms, sleeps five - and it is just a block from my old apartment building. It was also brand new on AirBnB, no reviews yet (though the host is a superhost with other places). Most importantly, I can cancel up to 48 hours before.

Looking at available places kicked me off on a whole nostalgia trip. I spent quite some time on google maps and street view wandering around. I found my old building, still there, and still with a McDonalds in the back yard. Where I lived was in the town of Lakewood, just one block
from the Cleveland border. The street that formed the city border is a commercial strip, with today many more fast food places than the single McDonalds from when I lived there. Online, with my iPad, I browsed restaurants, places to shop, the lakefront, taken up by a wholly unexpected cascade of memories.

The time I spent in Cleveland, starting in 1982, was the most urban period of my life (so far). I had had a hard time finding a job after grad school, and I finally took a job at a steel company, working actually in a steel plant in a small town in the middle of industrial rust belt Ohio, south of Akron. I had steel toed shoes, my own hard hat with the prestigious brown burned spot on the forehead from leaning into the furnace to admire the molten metal, and some incredibly unattractive prescription safety glasses. After two years, I loved the work but I was done living in this small, backwards town, and actively seeking other jobs when I was offered a promotion to headquarters, in downtown Cleveland. I jumped at it!

My apartment was an old apartment building (turn of the twentieth century) with a common layout. A brick building with four apartments, two up and two down, each apartment with the same long, narrow, floorplan. In front, a parlor with a balcony overlooking the street. Then the main bedroom, a dining room, and sharing the back wall, a small bedroom and a smaller kitchen, with a back balcony and outside stairs down to the parking places behind the building. The ceilings were high, there were blocked off fireplaces in the parlor and the dining room, and there were beautiful glass fronted builtin cabinets in the dining room. There was a smoke alarm, newly required and very sensitive. Because the ceilings were so high I couldn't reach it to pull the battery out when it went off, not even when standing on a chair, and so I went to the Radio Shack around the corner, bought a button switch, and wired in a way to cut off the noise from ground level whenever I was broiling something in the kitchen. 

Where I lived was on the border, not only of Cleveland and its closest, oldest suburb, but also the border between the relatively wealthy lakefront and lake-adjacent blocks and the solidly blue collar interior of Lakewood, trying hard not to slide down into poverty. Most of the buildings in my town were two-flats, up and down, in woodframe houses. I lived just part of a block away from the richer side, but my neighbor buildings were the two-flats. The folks I saw every day were a real mix. I don't think even on the lakeshore there was the wealth I later found in a very similar Chicago suburb, Evanston - also the closest suburb to the city and along the lakeshore from a different Great Lake.

The view behind my office building,
downtown Cleveland, 1982

In Cleveland, my office building was connected to the central rapid rail station, and via some other tunnels, to the old time downtown department store. If you have seen the movie "A Christmas Story" you have seen my office building. (It was filmed while I worked there. The filming was a very big deal in Cleveland.)  In the mornings, I would walk from my apartment around the corner to the main street, where I caught a bus that poked along, taking at least half an hour to drive the five or so miles right to my office. In the evenings, I would instead catch the Rapid (metro rail) which was much faster than the bus but dropped me off a half mile up the main street and I'd walk past all the run down businesses home. If I worked late, which was rare, I would take a taxi home as neither transit option felt safe. Often at lunch, I would go by tunnel to browse in the department stores, and more than once was mistaken for a sales person because I had no coat, even in winter. 

Industrial sailing, Cleveland, 1982

I liked the urban vibe, and the rusty vibe, even though it was not a happy time in the industrial midwest. To me, Cleveland felt a bit more "eastern" than midwestern, and it had a Great Lake and thus sailing opportunities. Cleveland's waterfront was almost entirely industrial, not yet experiencing the waterfront revivals other old cities were just starting then. But there was a small marina where I signed up for sailing lessons as soon as the weather permitted. From that contact, I was feeling my way into a sailing scene and thus a non-work social life, when my life was disrupted by the company being bought. I worked in corporate finance for my steel company, and actually worked on the merger / buy analysis, the only time in my life I had genuine "insider knowledge" where I could have made my fortune if only I had had money to invest (and didn't get caught). Our little financial analysis group were the first to realize that we were in exactly the kind of jobs where the masters of the merger would expect to find efficiencies, ie redundancies. So, in those pre-internet days, every Tuesday when the Wall Street Journal published its "help wanted" section, the six of us would go through the ads together. It was my boss who pointed out the airline ad ("Do you have an MBA? We want YOU!") that I applied for and got. That job took me to the suburbs of Chicago and back to a life behind the wheel of a car. (It also took me all over the world but that is a story for another time.)

Reclaimed lakefront, Cleveland, 2010

I never went back to Cleveland after I moved, until 2010 when I took my oldest boy to college in Ohio. He was in Oberlin, about 20 miles away from Cleveland. I stayed a couple of days with him, moving into and setting up the dorm room, attending parents orientation sessions. But there was a point where my boy didn't want me around for a bit, and there was a pause before an important session I needed to attend about maintaining his scholarship. I took a three hour self-guided tour of Cleveland. I went to the downtown, and the waterfront, which had been greatly transformed. There was the grand Rock and Roll Hall of Fame right on the water. There was a place to stroll along the lakefront. There were The Flats, an industrial area along the river (the river that famously caught fire). Notionally, back when I lived there in the early 1980s, they talked of turning The Flats into a new-urban-style place for loft-style apartments, bars and restaurants. Thirty years later, it was a reality, though without the polish seen in the high-end waterfront developments here in DC. There were still freighters using the river and railroads hauling ore and coal, right in the middle of this urban playground. Still the rust belt, but one with some attempts at polish.

Watching a partial eclipse on the National Mall, 2017

So I'm going back to Cleveland again next year. Plenty of time in the next 11 months to invite someone to come along and see the total eclipse- Whole House! Two Bedrooms! Sleeps Five!

Then and Now, London edition

 It’s a family thing, the then and now shots. But back in 2013 a certain young lady was sad and sullen and hated everything. She composed the current shot to match, but said she couldn’t stop giggling so it took several tries! Yay, how time will often help our kids turn back into reasonable people!

Dear Marilyn and Claire

I finally got through what I think (hope!) is the last of the paper-filled boxes from my mother's apartment. I have had new boxes spread out on the bed in the guest room for close to a year, each labeled with family names. As I went through my mother's boxes, I sorted papers I wanted to keep, without reading them beyond the point of deciding if I was going to keep them. So I have a box labeled "Shellabargers" with items from that side of the family, one labeled "Olsens" for that side, and so on. (At some point in the future I may dive into the contents further, and perhaps digitize some of it, certainly actually read the stuff). I actually thought I was done with document boxes earlier, but as I went to clean out the guest room, I discovered one more box. 

It was a great find! Full of important documents such as death certificates, it also contained a treasure trove of correspondence. Back in the day, people wrote letters. ("The Day" seems to have died out with the turn of the century, when email became the thing, later supplanted with social media.) This particular pile of correspondence was letters sent to my parents, dating from the 1960s through to the last poignant one dated 2008. That final one was from an old friend from Bellport to my mother, writing from her assisted living facility, disclosing her early Alzheimer's diagnosis, and going on to describe her continuing serious commitment to her church, including serving every week as a lay reader, "as long as I can".

I sorted the letters by sender, without reading them, but if they were from family or significant friends that wrote a lot, I put them in the appropriate box for later. Many documents in this last box went directly into paper recycling (who needs the caterer's invoice from my sister's wedding?) but I set aside into a separate pile some handwritten correspondence from people I didn't know or only vaguely remembered. It didn't feel right to just toss these letters without looking at them first. 

So last night, I sat down and read this handful of items. Many of them were touching, and I thought to preserve some of the anecdotes or aspects about my parents they reveal. 

My father was a professor at the University of Michigan, and there were several letters from former graduate students, in the United States and abroad. I was very surprised to see sincere thank you notes from a few former students, expressing in the strongest terms their gratitude for "your very generous gift". I'm guessing from additional clues my parents assisted these folks financially, in more than just a token way. I had no idea! My parents were fortunate indeed to be in a position to do this, and it gives new resonance to the way they drilled into me that wealth is not a sign of virtue, but a fortunate happenstance that should be shared.

One especially amusing letter I read was from my mother's friend from the neighborhood in Ann Arbor. Having children the same age is one of the things that cements relationships, and this friendship withstood eventual physical separation. Ruth was still living in Ann Arbor when I went to college there, and so the letter discusses what they had seen of me ("I think she has made a great adjustment and is quite content here.") The letter has notes of her despair over her boys, pursuing arts and fun things, ignoring their engineer/physicist dad's pleas to be practical. And she notes with humor and some irritation her husband's interviewing for a presidential appointment to the Atomic Energy Commission. "He was recently interviewed in some office surrounded by pictures of the Nixon family...  Nixon's men really zeroed in on his political life... It has been strangely quiet here since Bill stated in answer to a question that he could not always support President Nixon's programs or views... Maybe their Watergate guys have figured out we voted for McGovern!" Ruth was cognizant of the honor to her husband of being considered, but was greatly relieved it didn't happen.

The church in Bellport was very important to both my parents, and I already noted the letter above from one of their close friends from there. Our family was roiled by tragedy when the minister of the church committed suicide in 1971, when my brother and I were in high school. At that age, in my mind the tragedy was all about my reaction to it. So my memories of that time are only of me and my friends. I knew my parents over time became close friends of the widow, who remained in Bellport. But I was surprised to read a long letter from the mother of the deceased minister. She lived in Paris, before and after the tragedy, but had of course gone to Bellport immediately the news of her son's suicide reached her. She was writing to my parents some months later from Paris, thanking them for their extraordinary support while she was there, and asking them to let her know if the widow and children were not coping, and if she (the mother) should return to New York. Think about the intimacy that implies, for people who had never met until brought together by tragedy!

On a related note, my parents became very close friends with the new minister and his family at the church, standing as godparents to their daughter. He went on to become a bishop in the Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, and there are a stack of letters from him and his wife to my parents. But I read some pleasant notes from another church lady friend of my parents who actually peppered her notes to my mother with some snark about that second minister, snubs and thoughtless moments. Huh. I never would have known from everyone's more public behavior.

Many of my parents' closest friends for life were from their time in graduate school at Indiana University right after World War II. It was a happening time and place for biological sciences, but it was also a time where folks in their twenties (and early thirties - after de-mobilization) were getting married, finding jobs, and having their first children, forming indelible bonds. One of their intimates was James Watson, famous as a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA (and later infamous for acknowledging having used data stolen without consent from a female researcher to make the discovery, and even more recently infamous for expressing repugnant sexist and racist ideas about the role of genetics in human society).  I grew up on anecdotes about how he was actually kind of a jerk, tossed into a lake once by his roommates at a summer institute for neglecting his personal hygiene. At the same time, my parents were careful to acknowledge their friendship and genuine liking for him. So it was interesting to read some notes exchanged between my mother and a female friend from grad school (like my mother, once a budding scientist in a world of sexism, later a wife and mother) giggling about the controversy surrounding the publication / withdrawal from publication / subsequent new publication of his book, The Double Helix. Also giggles about the 40-year-old Harvard professor Watson's contemporaneous marriage to a Radcliffe 19-old undergraduate. This woman wrote about her "very close relationship [with Watson] that most likely would have become permanent" back then except for the intervention of their major professor, "who viewed any emotional liaison of Jim's as being tantamount to his intellectual suicide". Celebrity gossip, Shellabarger style!

I regret the loss of this form of communication. Not enough to start writing letters to people, but maybe enough to consider preserving on paper some more important email notes. Those immediately following my sister's death, for example. I tried to make sure I preserved them, electronically, but I haven't looked for them for years. Yet another rainy day project.

Guinea Pig

 I decided to dedicate my brain to science. Why wait until I’m dead?

Actually, I have applied several times to be included in various medical studies and trials. As the National Institutes of Health are nearby, there are bunches of trials around. I was turned down for an early Covid vaccine trial, due to my migraines. The migraines have knocked me out of several trials.

A year or more ago I applied for a study on the effect of exercise on memory being done at the University of Maryland. I was disqualified because I was already an active exerciser - they were looking for sedentary old people who would start an exercise program. They would be studied longitudinally, for at least six months. 

I was contacted again by the same folks this February, where they were conducting a related study, looking at short-term effects of exercise on memory. For this, they needed old people who had a basic fitness level, so we wouldn’t drop dead exercising for the experiment. I was excited to be included this time! There was no compensation for participating, but also no expense. Three visits to the nearby University of Maryland campus, at least two hours each. 

It was an interesting experience. I had to be cleared by my primary care physician for exercise, and by my dentist for the MRI machine - to verify I didn’t have any big metal things in my mouth. The first visit was to get a baseline of both my fitness and cognitive level. I was met at the door by a personable young man, Dan, who was in charge of this experiment for his doctoral research. I was led into the basement of the School of Public Health, into a bleak cinder block and linoleum room with just a Formica table and a couple of plastic chairs, where I signed a whole bunch of releases. I was run through a number of standard memory and cognitive tests: “remember these five words” and “draw a clock face and put the hands at ten minutes past eleven” and “name as many words starting with “F” as you can in two minutes”. I don’t have a great memory, but I’ve done these tests before. I knew it was just to establish a general baseline to qualify for the real test - make sure I wasn’t impaired - but of course I really put a lot into it, wanting to do well. Then, we went down the hall to an exercise lab. They strapped a mask on my face, a heart rate strap around my chest, and put me on an exercise bike. I had to pedal until my heart rate reached 85% of my predicted maximum, to get a “VO2 Max”, used as a proxy for overall fitness. Again, they were only interested in establishing a general category of “fit enough”, but of course I asked to see my numbers and figure out what they meant. (Dan told me I was “toward the top” of his test subjects, but I was then disappointed when I got home and did more research to realize the number put me in the “average” category for my age and sex. I want to be above average, of course!)

The next two visits were to involve a lot of time having my brain scanned in an MRI, while performing a cognitive task and also scanning before and after and the task, while simply lying there in the tube. The difference between the two visits was that one time I would first pedal on an exercise bike for 30 minutes, and the other time while sitting still for 30 minutes, before going into the tube. The MRI was in a different building on the edge of campus, adjacent to  a veterinary facility, betraying U of Md’s land grant college roots. The MRI is a scarce resource - Dan told me several times that it was costing nearly a thousand dollars an hour, so he was excited to have a grant big enough to handle 40 people with two scans each. But also, the scheduling had to be exact, with no wasted time. They have sorted through a lot of test subjects that can’t do the long MRIs, either because of metal in their body or inability to tolerate the confined and noisy space. So Dan was very pleased that I was able to do this. There were a long list of requirements for clothing - besides the obvious of no underwire bra, but apparently a lot of exercise leggings that are shiny have metal in them. So cotton sweats and tees are the preferred attire, unless you are willing to be put in scrubs or a hospital gown. Even some tattoos are problematic for MRIs. Who knew?

The first day, I found the test site, arriving early, just as Dan was also pulling up in his car so he could lead me in. MRI machines are often below ground, always shielded from outside interference, so of course there was no cell or internet reception there. The building seemed empty except for us - me, Dan, another grad student assistant, and the MRI operator. I was the second subject of the day, starting at 10 am. That first day, I sat and pedaled on an exercise bike, in an empty cinder block room with no music or entertainment and my seat got sore - I haven’t been biking in a couple of years. Every five minutes they took my heart rate and asked me for my relative exertion level. After my exercise, I went into the control room for the MRI, where I was stripped of my watch and glasses and shoes, and then the MRI operator wanded me down with a metal detector, like a TSA agent. I was insulated with ear plugs and pads, effectively rendering me deaf. We went into the room with the MRI itself, where I lay down on the pad and had my head caged in and a display fastened on top. I was handed a small keypad with three buttons to use with my right hand for the task, and a bulb to squeeze in case of emergency, and a finger tip heart rate monitor anchored my left hand. I was slid into the tube, and they communicated with me by typing messages that appeared on a display above me. After a moment, they started with the scans. Each was announced with a typed message, like "this first scan will be 20 seconds. Are you ready?"  It took me a beat to realize there was a microphone in there, so while I couldn't hear them, they could hear me if I talked, and they needed to hear me agree each time.

I recall some previous MRI scans as being mechanically noisy, with whirring and banging. These scans were all noisy, but in a more electronic way, beeping and booping and squealing. I couldn't really assess how time was passing, except by what they typed about how long each scan would be. There were some shortish scans, and then I did my "task". They showed me a series of pictures, and I had to push a button indicating whether the picture was new, a repeat of one previous, or similar to one previous. The "new" versus "similar" was nuanced and a bit difficult. I'm not sure how long each trial was - five or ten minutes? - and there were two different trials.Of course I worked really hard to get them right. And then after the trials more scans, some really lengthy, with at least four that were eight minutes a pop. During each scan I made an effort to be truly motionless, and in between I could flex my fingers and squeeze my muscles a bit, but all told it was 75 minutes in the tube. After my task was complete, I relaxed and just drifted while they continued to scan. And each scan had its own song, either high pitched or low, steady or syncopated rhythms, monotone or two or three notes. Finally, they told me we were done and slid me out, uncaged my head, and I got to sit up. I was stiff from staying still all that time.

The second day was just like the first, except instead of peddling on the bike, I sat on it for 30 minutes. My seat got sore again! And they took my heart rate and my perceived exertion every five minutes. They strove to make the session as similar to the first as possible, except for the actual exercise part.

The scan was long and tedious again, except for the tasks. I had been feeling sluggish all morning, and I know I didn't do as well on the tasks - I was conscious of mistakes right after I made them. I don't know if the difference was at all due to the exercise, but I'm sure they'll be able to see a difference. After my tasks, I was nearly able to fall asleep inside the machine, despite the beeps and boops, but I thought actually going to sleep would be a bad thing for what my brain looked like, so instead I mentally sorted through my mess of tools in the basement, trying to come up with a better way of storing things so I can find them again.

So I did my bit for science. I am on a list of potential test subjects for future tests as well - they are always looking for guinea pigs, and apparently I was a good one for them.

Report Card: Wrap Up of 2021

I put together my report card for all of 2021. It really is a good exercise, because it keeps me honest. How I feel about how active I am, how much I do of something, is often very different from what the actual truth in the data is. For example, I feel like I'm being pretty active. Yet, by almost every measure, I've been less active almost every month of 2021 compared to my averages from 2020 and 2019. Huh. I've got to buckle down!

I've deliberately put a single, relatively small image of the report card here, because I'm looking at trends, not the specific numbers. This won't make a lot of sense on the phone - if you turn the phone to "landscape" you should probably at least be able to scroll through the whole image. In looking at the monthly changes, darker green is better. Migraines are in red, darker is worse. The three blue columns on the right show changes for 2021, 2020, and 2019, and it's the trends here that matter. Basically, darker blue is better for the measure.

The top group is activity, and as mentioned, everything is down from previous years. In 2021, May shows as the dark green month. That was both high gardening season, and getting ready for the first big sea voyage that went in early June. The good news is that December was up by most measures compared to the previous few months (which no doubt is why my subjective guess is that activity is up overall, the well known subjective "recentcy bias"). One thing that was much better this year than last year is strength. I started doing video training in February, and am doing it twice a week now very consistently. I love my trainer, and we have a nice social chat while I work harder for her than I would for myself. That is going to continue for the forseeable future. I also did a couple of months of physical therapy for my knees, and that is basically additional strength training for my legs not captured here. But I would definitely say that I feel stronger all over now than I did last year.

"Miles walked" is when I set out the door for a walk, and record it on my Garmin. The so-much-higher numbers last year made me go look at the specific data for last year, to see what I was doing. It appears that last year, I made a point of doing the "park loop" almost every day - a mile and a half out the door and through the park and back through the neighborhood. Most were first thing in the morning, after the first cup of coffee but before the second. It was just what I did. And then last winter in the bad weather and the dark, with bad knees and migraines, and an ailing dog that couldn't come with me, I just stopped doing that. I've been out walking more, but it's not a habit or a routine, at a standard time, but something I work in around other things. Hmm.... THIS is why looking at this stuff is valuable to me. What worked before? Why did it stop working? What can I do to get back to something that will work well for me now?

Moving on...

My weight is relatively stable across the year, and for the past three years. I am tracking my food more often than in previous years, and I'll have more to say about that in another post.

The really good news is that my migraines remain at a relatively low level, down from earlier this year and last year. (2019 migraine data is not reliable.) I'm meditating less than prior years - in formal meditations, at least. I think that reflects two things: I tend to go to formal meditations when I'm highly stressed or in pain, and those things are better. The other aspect is I do informal mindful check-ins, a few breaths, a body scan, a gut check, much more often. I don't capture those, of course. They are just part of how I go about my day, like scratching my nose or getting a drink of water. But I may try to work some longer formal sits into my days - I think it has benefits in several ways.

My entertainment aspects continue to cruise along nicely. I read about the same number of books this year as last, and blogged about as often. Sadly, I saw fewer movies, and I'd like to do better with that. None were in theaters, so almost all were alone. (I watched a lot of TV in 2021, but I haven't found an easy way to log that.)  As things loosened up last summer, I got into town a few times, I actually went on four trips away from home, and I got more sailing in, pretty consistently every couple of weeks starting in March right through November.

Going into this new year, I really want to be more active. I'm scheduled to go on another hiking retreat in Utah in March, and so that will be my kedge for the winter. I know it's gotten me out in the cold and the grey a few times I would have passed on otherwise. Freezing rain is supposed to come in the afternoon tomorrow, maybe I'll try the "after the first cup" timing tomorrow!

Satisfied

I'll never be satisfied!

I've been embarked on an odyssey of mindful eating attempts. One of the main goals of this is to reach a point where I know not only "what" but "how much" I want to eat, I eat just that, and then I stop. Having just one exquisite but tiny little hand-crafted chocolate, for example, carefully selected from a free display, and then walking on, satisfied. Or, more prosaically, dishing out a small portion of one of my favorite dinners at home and then not even finishing that, because I'm satisfied. I truly do not want more.

As if.

As an experienced dieter, I have encountered various descriptions of this holy grail over the years. All of them are about how to think and act around food, and only go lightly on what to actually eat. No food lists or meal plans. Just paying attention to how much and what you eat.

I think there is a lot to this notion of listening to your body and acting on it. I picked up a book years ago, The Beck Diet Solution, with a Cognitive Based Therapy approach to eating, marketed as "learn to think like a thin person"! (This book was very influential in my starting this blog back in 2010, as one of the tenets was to have a diet buddy. There is still a link to the site over on the right.) There were a lot of useful exercises - self-experiments - to do involving learning how to recognize what we actually feel in our bodies, versus all the layers of thoughts and emotions we overlay on food. For example, she instructs you to skip a meal and check in on hunger at regular intervals, to remind yourself what hunger really feels like, while also discovering that hunger is not an emergency, you won't die, people live for weeks without eating anything. Also, to eat very slowly, setting down the fork between bites, and writing down how you feel before, during, and after. Make a daily plan in advance of all meals, and assess afterwards how you did. I found all of these exercises useful. Ultimately, though, the CBT approach relies on logical self-talk ("I would rather weigh less than eat this cupcake") in a way that requires self-discipline and self-control. After a while, it just gets tiring. It's a never-ending grind. Sigh.

Several years later, I discovered the Summer Tomato, a much more joyful approach to how to eat. Created by The Foodist, the basic approach was to only eat Real Food that tastes awesome (thus fresh tomatoes only in the summer), which requires cooking for yourself. Further, eat mindfully, exercise, and listen to your body. All good stuff, and reading her book several times, reading her blog, and listening to her podcast really did start to change my relationship to food. It wasn't a fight, because if it was a fight, you couldn't win. For me, it was still a struggle to lose or maintain my weight, but I definitely upgraded my food choices and learned to appreciate my food much more. She offered a week-long video course on mindful eating that I subscribed to. The main things I got out of that were to slow way down - fork down between bites - and to chew thoroughly before swallowing. And eliminate distractions while eating - tune in fully to the physical experience of eating and how it makes you feel. She promised the magic state of knowing exactly what and how much to eat I described up top as the result of fully embracing this approach. I never reached nirvana, but I started to make peace with where I was.

Somewhere along the way I started meditating, and I subscribed to the Ten Percent Happier app, where I am still a happy customer. They have a course on Mindful Eating, with Judson Brewer, who is an addiction specialist. I took that course, which goes deeper into the mindfulness approach than the Summer Tomato course. From there, I subscribed to Brewer's own pricey app, Eat Right Now. That had an intense month-long course on mindful eating. Some approaches I've learned from Brewer (that also work for things like anxiety and pain) are breaking the habit loop, RAIN, and disenchantment. Habit loops are something I knew about, but participating in the course helped me specifically note habits and try to modify them. RAIN (recognize, acknowledge, investigate, note) is a meditation technique where you turn in towards an unpleasant sensation (cravings, in the case of mindful eating), and explore what you are feeling with kind curiosity. This is called "surfing the urge", knowing that it won't last. Disenchantment comes from exploring your body after eating whatever, and really feeling in your body whether it feels good. I had some success with these things. I recognize a habit much more readily now, and much more of my eating is a conscious choice, though not always a wise decision. I was sometimes successful at surfing my urges, but often my urge seems to be driven from deep within me and doesn't dissipate after ten minutes or so, as the technique is geared towards. Instead, I might drive to the supermarket to buy ice cream, because I have an idée fixe that just won't go away. That's where disenchantment comes in - after eating, I can explore how my body really feels. As I started to use this technique, imagine my surprise that I can eat an awful lot of ice cream before my body starts to feel bad. But, there is a point where it does actually not feel very good. Hmm...

Then I stumbled on Corinne Crabtree, and her pricey on-line No BS weightloss course. She has taken bits and pieces of all of the approaches above and put it together in a way that really speaks to me. She is profane and down-to-earth. The basic approach is eat when you are hungry and stop when you are satisfied (which is usually less than "full). We are fat because we overeat (eat when we are not hungry or have reached satisfied), and there are three reasons we overeat:

• Lack of body awareness
• Failure to feel our feelings
• Allowing our habit brain to take over

It's all about self-discovery, no shame, only data to explore. I've been through her video course, and some of her supplemental courses (eg, "Binge Better").  I listen to some of her podcasts, participate in her Facebook group, and almost daily use her planning and assessment worksheets which take about 10 minutes to do. There is definitely a cult of personality around Corinne, and I love that she reaches a population that is unlikely to follow my path of CBT and meditation and other approaches on the edge of woo-woo. She teaches habit loops, body awareness, and even how to feel your feelings, to a really wide audience that might not otherwise hear about these things. And I'm not being superior here: the way she talks about them are very useful for me as well.

For the past month, ever since I covered up the numbers on the scale for my daily weigh-in, I've been really tuning in to try to find "satisfied". I've jettisoned any goals around pounds, instead focusing on what and how much I'm eating - but in a loving and investigative way, not in a restrictive way. I've got "hungry" down pretty well, and I feel like I'm making progress towards finding satisfied. Late nights continue to be an issue for me, but it feels like progress towards being what I want to be, someone who eats what she wants, in the amounts she wants, and is at a healthy and attractive weight. 

My meditation app, Ten Percent Happier, is having a weeklong new challenge course that starts tomorrow, on intuitive eating. Short videos and a meditation for seven days. It's all part of the same approach and it's likely to help me be focused. I really liked something that came up in a teaser podcast for this course: "It's not about self-control, it's about self-care".  Yeah, baby! I've learned a lot this year about self love and self care, and I think I may be reaching a real tipping point here in my relationship to eating. I'll let you know how it goes.

Books

My sixth birthday
Yay, a book! Cowboys!

I've been a reader since I can remember. One of my earliest memories is sitting with my brother with him teaching me to read. I was skipped a grade because in kindergarten I was reading at second grade level. Now, I'm probably not tops in comprehension, but I am quick. Books I read along the way have had a profound influence on my life. Even the light entertainments I consume have had a positive influence on my vocabulary.

Despite having been employed at a library for four years, and having family members and many friends who became professional librarians, I was not a good library user. I loved going and checking out books. I would read them, and then let them sit around the house for weeks on end. I decided it would be cheaper to hang out at bookstores than to pay fines. The decade I spent in Ann Arbor at college coincided with the founding there of Border's Books - I've met Tom Border many times. During my first years post-grad school, going to the bookstore was one of the biggest pleasures of many weekends. It remained a constant pleasure for decades.

Around about the turn of the century, I realized I needed to either stop buying books or else get more bookshelves. My small house was bursting at the seams. I opted to line my entire basement with Billy bookcases from Ikea. When I found an author I liked, I went all in, usually buying an entire series of mystery or science fiction and often re-reading them. I loved looking at a series all lined up together on the shelf.

Then came e-readers and the possibility of not only not having so many books lying around but instant gratification when I wanted a new book. I was not a first-wave adopter, but I got a kindle in the second or third generation. I made a decision to never buy a mystery or science fiction any other way. For me, it's seamless to read on the device - it doesn't get in my way at all. But I have learned that actual physical reference books, and coffee table books, and cookbooks, have big advantages over something accessed on a small black-and-white kindle or an only slightly bigger (though colorful) tablet. Three or four years ago a friend showed me how to get library e-books onto the kindle, saving me literally thousands of dollars on novels since then.

When I'm into something, I can be really into it. I like to learn about them. Often that means buying books on the topic. My remaining shelf of "how-to" books can serve as a little chronology of hobbies I've had over the years. Backgammon, sewing and specifically quilting, knitting, cross-country skiing, kayaking, motorcycling, all make an appearance here. I still have these books because I'm not necessarily done with these activities.

All the basement books left after culling

When it came time to renovate the basement, all the stuff down there was an obstacle to getting started. It took me about three years to get through all the crap (with some left at the end to be disposed of only when I was moving back in). I got rid of an incredible number of books. Our county library has a very active "Friends" group that run two retail used-book stores. One of them was located just a mile from my house for several years (it's since moved much farther away). After my first ambitious culling into boxes, and subsequent struggle to get them out of the basement and into the car, I realized I couldn't carry a full box of books, and so brown paper grocery bags became my favored method of disposal. Each weekend I would drop off 3-4 bags, not wanting to carry more than that at one time and also trying not to overwhelm the volunteers at the library.

I had to hide my books behind a fence
to keep Rocky from indulging his literary taste

I worked in a library for quite a while. I have to organize my books. Currently I have them roughly sorted by topic into different physical locations, but not actually alphabetized. I still have bookcases in the two upstairs bedrooms, my office, and in the room formerly known as The Dog's Room, just renovated. I took advantage of the reno to get rid of ten brown bags of books from the Dog's Room (and a shelf of DVDs), most to the library bookstore. The books remaining in the room now are travel books and garden books. This includes travel writing, even fiction set in destination locales, and nature writing and field identification guides. All of these books have value to me in hard copy with the ability to look at pictures and flip back and forth between pages.

Travel books

Taking the time to dust, clean, and sort the books as I moved back into the Dog's Room this week has sparked a real interest in looking at them again. I kept old travel books for places I still hope to go to, though I'll probably buy an ipad version of a new travel guide for any place I go.  I haven't really looked at some of the garden books for a few years, because I had to keep them locked away from Rocky and it just wasn't convenient to get them out. So I have some of my winter reading set! 

In my bedroom, I have an entire six-shelf bookcase of books on aviation. Not how-to books, I got rid of those to some eager takers in the neighborhood in the basement culling. These are mostly memoirs and biographies of early women fliers, and some fiction also starring mostly women. When I got bit by the flying bug, it was an extreme situation. For a couple of years, I read little else. I was traveling a lot for work and I would drop into bookshops in whatever country I was in, searching for books about women fliers. So it's really a good collection. I think I could part with it, but I want to part with it as a collection to a home that will appreciate it. Any ideas?

Garden books