Rancid-Tea

My thoughts on life

How I Became A Runner

I’m currently training for a half marathon on Memorial Day. This involves more running than I’ve ever done before, and that running has given me a lot of time to reflect on how I became a runner in the first place.

When I talk about running and fitness with people who have only known me for a short time, they often assume that I’ve always been into fitness. They think I probably played sports in Jr. high and high school, perhaps ran cross country or track and field. This could not be further from the truth. I hated sports, running and anything athletic all through school. I was slow, I had no endurance, and I was uncoordinated. Phy ed was the only class I struggled with, usually only getting a B or C, based solely on effort. I knew I was bad at sports, and I also believed that it was because I was inherently weak and physically slow. Neither my parents nor my gym teachers made any effort to change that belief. Continue reading →

 May 6, 2013 Fitness , ,

Reboot

For the last few months, I’ve had ideas for things to write about, but each time I thought about starting a new post on my blog, I thought of how much work my blog needed, and I would set the whole task aside for later. Yesterday I took the first step into getting things sorted out: I installed WordPress to simplify everything.

This morning I imported all of my old posts. I left out the few comments and tags for now, because it’s better that I get the posts imported and move forward than stall endlessly on those details. There are probably some old posts with horrible formatting issues, broken links and things like that, and I might eventually fix them, but not today.

If I do start posting regularly again, I will almost surely add more features, plugins, links, and all that other good stuff, but for now simple is best.

Cheers!

 May 5, 2013 Blogging

Why I Won’t Practice Hot Yoga

A coworker recently gave me the idea to try early morning yoga before work, to get some exercise in before I’m tired from a day behind a desk. I’ve been practicing yoga for over a year now, and it sounded like a good idea. I checked my regular yoga studio, but they don’t offer early morning classes. I began checking around and found several studios that do, but all of them are ‘hot’ yoga classes, meaning the room is heated above normal temperatures, into the 80s, 90s or even up to 105.

The idea behind hot yoga is that you will sweat more, and that will release toxins from your body. What could be bad about that? Continue reading →

 January 30, 2011 Fitness ,

New Photos

I’ve uploaded a few more photos to Flickr.

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Check them out.

 August 15, 2010 Photography

I write when I’m bored

So, I haven’t posted anything in months and months because apparently my life has been just peachy and I’ve had nothing to write about. Does this mean I only complain? I refuse to read through the pages and pages of previous entries to find out if this is true or not.

In case you are the only person who reads this, and you read about how I was going to get surgery on my jaw, and you’ve been checking on a daily basis to see how that went, the answer is that it went great. I had my surgery on February 18th and everything went “by the book” or so my surgeons told me. I had a completely painless (though tedious) recovery, during which i could only eat foods I didn’t need to chew. Culinary creativity saved me from a total food meltdown, and this was good.

Why am I bored today, having not been bored enough to write for half a year, you ask? It all started a few months (was it a full year?) ago when my brother-in-law and his long-time girlfriend decided to get married. Because it’s what brother’s do, he asked my husband to be his best man. Continue reading →

 July 5, 2010 Uncategorized

Bird Feeders

Shortly after moving into our house, I decided to get a small thistle seed bird feeder, to attract birds to our yard. We had the feeder out and usually kept it full for almost a year, and attracted plenty of finches and sparrows.

I mentioned to my mother how it seemed like those were the only birds we got in the cities. I never saw cardinals, bluejays, chickadees, or nuthatches. She suggested I get a sunflower seed feeder, and said it would attract more birds. Since my parents have several feeders out year round, and plenty of birds to go with, I asked if they had any that they didn’t use on account of squirrels and they gave me one that had been sitting out in the garage. We hung it up in our back yard and filled it with sunflower seeds and waited.

It has been two weeks, and now we have a variety of birds I didn’t see before. Purple finches, way more gold finches, cardinals, and a mourning dove have all become frequent visitors.

With this success, I’m tempted to get a suet feeder, and make some vegan suet, as well as a humming bird feeder, and possibly a mixed seed feeder. I would also like to get a bird bath and see if that attracts even more birds.

June 21, 2009

Jaw Realignment, Step 1 continued

Okay, first in response to the couple of questions I’ve gotten, because my case is minor, the only adjustments needed during surgery will be to separate my upper jaw, slide it forward, and then anchor it in place with plates and screws. My jaws will only need to be held shut with very tight rubber bands, not wired shut.

In more severe cases, if your jaws are very different lengths, the surgeon may have to adjust both the upper and lower jaws, requiring the jaws to be wired shut, post op. If your jaws are canted, front to back, or side to side, a wedge of bone is permanently removed during the surgery, and again the jaws must be wired shut. Both of these operations are somewhat riskier than the basic operation I require, and can have a longer healing time.

Upon receiving my request for pre-approval, my insurance company refused the claim because my “malocclusion could be treated non-surgically.” Which prompted me to call them, and ask “what if I already had orthodontics for this and it didn’t fix it?” After a lot of back and forth between my new doctors and orhtodontist, my old orthodontist, and my health insurance company, they decided that it is, in fact, covered.

I have scheduled preliminary appointments with the new orthodontist but at the moment I don’t have an appointment to get braces on yet. The earliest that could happen is in a few weeks.

 May 23, 2009

Jaw Realignment – Step 1

If your bite is off and you have trouble chewing you might have a couple of options. Depending on the severity of your case, braces might be sufficient to get your teeth to line up. For me, that was not the case, so now I get to try the ‘moderate’ solution, which is to have part of my skull sawed off, moved and put back in a better place. This also involves braces (woot).

I had my consultation with an oral surgeon yesterday afternoon (during snowmageddon) and had some x-rays taken. I’m hoping to get digital copies that I can post. The surgeon said I had a pretty simple case, and he thought I would have good results, so I scheduled a consult with an orthodontist to get the first physical step underway: braces. Ugh.

I’m definitely excited at the prospect of being able to chew things like rice and pasta for the first time since I was a child. I will try to keep this process updated.

 February 27, 2009

Twitter

I’ve finally caved to peer pressure and started a twitter account. If you want to see random updates throughout the day (seriously it only makes sense if you have a twitter account) let me know and I’ll give you my username.

 January 27, 2009

All Work and No Sleep Makes Me A Crazy Girl

I’ve recently been on a project at work that has had me working long (and over) nights, weekends, and in the last week, I’ve had a stretch of 36 hours where I did not leave work and got less than 3 hours of sleep. I have now had my first shower at work, and was forced to go buy clean underthings in the middle of the day so I had something fresh to change into after the shower.

That said, I haven’t had a ton of sleep in the last two weeks. I was *almost* caught up on Monday, after getting in some 30 hours of shut-eye over the weekend, but then immediately dove headlong into the week. My body finally gave out on me on Wednesday, and I started getting a cold. The project ramped down around the same time, so I’m back to working shorter shifts (especially since I had over 30 hours in for the week by the end of Wednesday).

Last night, in spite of the fact that I could have used the sleep, I went to the 331 Club to watch my co-worker’s roommate play a set. I really enjoyed the music and had a really good time. It was a sort of spur of the moment decision, and my lack of sleep probably played into why I agreed to go, but it was nice to get past the moment of social awkwardness (“is she just inviting me to be nice??’) and go. If you’re into folk music at all, or just need something really relaxing to listen to, check out Brianna Lane.

 January 16, 2009