Energy, welcome back!

Hola!
The song "Just Stand Up" is blaring in the background as I consider this post.  Gotta love my magically realistic iPod--wonder what Garcia Marquez or Allende would make of my communicating iPod?

This week has been great--I'm like the freakin' Energizer Bunny.  And damn it feels sooooo good.  Don't know what's going on in my endocrine system, but it can stay.  I actually feel like I have energy and that I can function physically.  I'm still doing some form of physical exercise just about every day (just did 5.80 miles on my bike in 35 minutes), and I'm finally figuring out the calorie counter thingie so that I get more vitamins and less sodium in my diet.  Sleep has been pretty good too, except for one night where I stayed up til 2am doing more geneaology research.  More on that later...

Somewhere I read about a woman (of course I can't remember where) who kept track of her miles on a treadmill, and figured out how many miles it would take her to walk to places in the US that she wanted to see, and it kept her motivated to keep going to reach her "destinations".  Maybe I should try that and see how long it would take me to bike to, oh, the Grand Canyon.  At only 5 miles a whack, it might be discouraging!  Still, it's a cool idea...where should I go first? 

And I'm now down about 6 pounds or so.  (Insert smiley face here.) It's work, but it's happening.  I was afraid that in my thyroidless state, my metabolism would be completely dormant and the weight would stay.  At least I've proven to myself that it's possible....again, when I look at Sofia Vergara's figure, of course it's possible.  I just don't have the Hollywood luxury of hours of working out with a trainer, or a great gene pool with said figure already in place.

Whatever--if nothing else, maybe I can pull the bag of smaller sized clothing down from the closet by the middle of the fall.

The other side benefit to my time on the bike is reading--I'm doing tons of reading.  One goal for this summer is to finally read "House of the Spirits" (in English first) by Isabel Allende to its end.  Strange that I have taught a fragment of the book in Spanish 4 for the past 4 years, but have never been able to get into the book myself even though my students come back later to tell me how much they love the book (it's either on the summer reading list or taught senior year).  I'm finally past the first 30 pages and am actually enjoying it.

My reflexes and cognitive stuff are still off--the dropsies and lack of balance are  horrendous, and I almost forgot to put my car in park in the Target parking lot after pulling into a space.  I feel like I have to write everything down or have constant conversations with myself to get through the day.  Those conversations can get tiring!

My big challenge is coming up this week--a few days with Mr. Wonderful's family at a seaside house to celebrate Mom-in-Law's upcoming 88th birthday.  The whole thing is a surprise planned by Sis-in-Law, and Mr. W's two brothers are coming  from out of state as a surprise.  The house looks great, and the weather is supposed to be perfect.  The challenge comes from their love (obsession?) with all types of fried seafood, along with temptations of munchies and gallons of wine that will surely be consumed.  If I can get out and walk every day, I should be ok and not derail myself too much.  It should be fun--crazy, but fun.

Mookie is lying on the couch next to me, on his back, all four paws in the air, out cold.  So cute.

If you have a connection to St. Peregrine, send up a few prayers for my friend who underwent a double mastectomy yesterday in her continuing battle against breast cancer.  I haven't heard anything about how the surgery went, so I guess no new is just no news.  She sounded upbeat on the phone the night before. She's facing radiation next once she heals from this surgery....again, makes thyca look like a walk in the park.

As for the family research, I finally found some juicy info on my mom's family.  She would have died--her grandfather and his brother spent 3 months in a house of correction after a second charge in one year of illegally selling liquor from their pharmacies in 1916!  I stumbled across articles in the newspapers on line about it--the grandfather apparently fainted upon hearing his sentence. I've never heard anyone talk about it, so they managed to keep it well hidden.  I'll have to search out the court trial records.   It's funny--they apparently had lots of half-pint bottles of whisky in their stores that they said they bought themselves for making embalming fluid.  Ok, if you say so, but the courts didn't buy it.  That gave me quite a chuckle, and now explains why his daughter, my grandmother, was probably not fond of alcohol and constantly worried about "what will the neighbors think".

So, I finally found a jailbird in the family.  I think the rumbling I heard last night wasn't thunder, but rather a few family members rolling over in their graves. Hee hee.

Let's hope this energy thing stays for a while--I almost feel like a normal human being except for when I can't process a conversation or drop a bottle of delicious red wine from Spain's Ribera del Duero that I was looking forward to all over the garage....I can almost deal with those inconveniences if I can do it on the go and not sacked out on the couch.  Have to be thankful for the little things, right?

*&^%$# August.

It's August.  Sigh.  July disappeared in a haze of brain fog, and now, it's August.  I think I go back to school exactly one month from yesterday (Tuesday after Labor Day). 

We're still in condo chaos mode--I get rid of one pile of boxes and another pile comes in.  There's not much left at our old place, but it has to find space here somewhere, and it has to find it soon.  I spent today consolidating stuff, and every time I planned to bring stuff out to the car, the heavens opened.  Thunderstorms most of the day and torential downpours the rest.  Back tomorrow for more.

Weekend was fun--we went to upstate NY to visit my college roommate Jules.  We split up the weekend--Mr. Wonderful brought his fire truck to a convention in Syracuse, and Jules and I spent Saturday scrapbooking.  The fire truck made it out and back with no problems, and I took my car "just in case" the truck broke down.  Glad I did--when I got to Jules' house a half hour after Mr. W, he was sitting on the bumper looking like he was in some serious pain.  He said the noise, heat and rattling got to him after about the first hour.  On Friday Jules and her husband both had to work, so we drove around, hitting bookstores, ice cream and farm stands along the way.  The area was beautiful--it was hard to believe that we were only 20-30 miles or so from the state capital, and in the middle of ruralness.  Is that even a word?  I had a massage on Friday (aaaaaaahhhhhhh) at a place that Jules goes to, and she went on Saturday morning while I played games with her 6 year old son.  I am not happy to say that he beat me at Uno, Sorry and Concentration.  I had no chance of winning the concentration game given my current level of cognitive functioning!  It was great to hang out, eat good food and catch up.  And, I think I finally finished scrapbooking my actual wedding.  5 years later.  I'm in the middle of the honeymoon pages now...

I even snuck in a 45 minute walk on Friday.  I missed doing exercise on Saturday and Sunday, but I got right back on my bike this morning and pedaled away for 32 minutes.  I finished "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and am now reading "Senior Year" by Globe reporter Dan Shaughnessy.  It's pretty interesting because he's from the same home town as Mr. Wonderful, and his high school basketball coach is a family friend, and the book is dedicated to him.  The descriptions are wonderful, and the inside glimpse of a star high school athlete being recruited to play baseball is fascinating. 

Also, Gena Lee Nolin has a group on Facebook called "Sexy Thyroid" or something like that--if you type in her name it will come up.  She is working on a new book with Mary Shomon--that would be a good read.  Mary Shomon's stuff has been incredibly helpful over the years. 

There was a rather large outcry on the Good Housekeeping website over the thyroid disease article.  I finally read it, and disappointing doesn't begin to cover how it felt while reading.  The author needs some help and should have interviewed  a few more people, or at least seen a few more doctors before putting pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard).  She seemed willing to go along with the doctor's claim that she was testing in the normal range, so she was ok.  Her answer was to drink more coffee, take a spinning class and I forget the third thing.  In the meantime, she's only going to get worse.  What bothered me and few other people was that this article was very misleading, and if some poor person picked it up looking for answers, the information was outdated and in some areas just plain wrong. 
Shame on GH--they should have retracted the whole thing. 

And, I've been eating my Irish Flahavan's Progress Oatlets again with slivered almonds, dried cranberries, brown sugar, cinnamon and flax seed.  Talk about filling--I'm not hungry again until late afternoon.  Today I felt like the Energizer Bunny--I definitely feel like I have more energy lately, a nice change from the beginning of the summer. 

Off to bed for more tomorrow....I'm seeing all sorts of boxes in my sleep!