Slacking. Not.

What have I been up to the past few days? The usual, work and trying to stay ahead of the ball game.

I left work early on Friday. I had to get tabs for Taez and Chael, and most places are only open 8-5, if that. Got those, then boogied over to OPTP (Occupational and Physical Therapy Products) on the other side of 494. They have all sorts of fun stuff, like the Stretch Out Strap, foam rollers and other stuff I can use in my healing practice and on me. Came home with a foam roller and the strap, and will probably be back to get more.

Came home, had supper, and read a book until 1 am. That was my 42nd birthday. Woo hoo.

Saturday morning I had a client (for the first time in probably a year...). He found me on the QT website. I went to his home and worked on him. Did more coaching and intuitive work than QT. It was mostly intuitive. We started with what was hurting and I followed along from there. He did a lot of work, releasing some deep, old crap that was not his to begin with. I'll be seeing him again once he gets done with all the medical tests.

The appointment was a good reminder of why I'm a healing practitioner. There was resonance as to some of the same stuff we both had going on. Some of the stuff that came out of my mouth I have no idea of where it came from. Whatever I said was what he needed to hear and do to help himself.

Two things I do remember was that 'you are not your past' and 'you are a present to yourself.' I may have heard or read them elsewhere, that morning they rang true on many levels.

A reminder of what I can do and be when the need is there.

Now I just need to set the intention that the phlebotomist doing my needle sticks for platelet donation hits the vein perfectly the first time. Last time I ended up with matching quarter size bruises in my elbows. This time I didn't even get to donate. W is usually really good at doing my sticks - she doesn't even have to mark where the vein is. Normally. This time she missed both arms. If she hadn't fouled up my outflow arm, I could have done a single needle donation with both outflow and return in the same vein. No joy, no donation, and over a half dollar sized bruise on my left elbow to show for it. Try it again on the 19th.

I move desks on Friday. I get to be with my boss's team in a much warmer location - the southwest corner. I'm looking forward to being in that area. Dual monitors for the computer, warmer location. I need to bring the compass to see what direction I'm facing - I'm thinking north, which is one of my good directions.

The next couple days are going to be nuts with medical appointments. Tomorrow night I get a massage, Thursday morning I start physical therapy, and I see Dr. M Thursday night. See how I feel Thursday night, I'll give you an update.

Sigh of relief

What's the sigh of relief for?

My boss told me my contract has been extended for six more months. I have a job through October. She IM'd me the news between meetings. I was in tears when I saw what she had written.

Six more months. In this economy, that could be the difference between me losing my home and me staying afloat. I couldn't have asked for a better birthday present.

Other good news. I occasionally fill out surveys online. Sometimes they lead to taste tests where I get paid for my opinion of a new food product. Last week I took a survey for a technology company that makes iPod accessories. Got to the end of the survey and found out I qualified for a product of my choosing up to $100 value. I have to call in with the right info and they will send me the product I chose for free. Sweetness! I'm getting an iPod dock that has card reader slots and two extra USB ports.

Saw Dr. M tonight. He finally gave me a referral so I can get scheduled to start my physical therapy. Another step on the road to full recovery.

And, to really make this a good week, I got a call from Learning Strategies. Back in February I put my name on the waiting list to get into the PhotoReading class Paul Scheele is teaching next weekend. I was 17th on the list. The call was to say that spots had opened up and I could get into the class for $80. That's 1/10 the going price for the class. I'll have to buy the new edition of the book and manual. Oh darn, I'm in the class.

Then, today I find out it's the director's birthday today. The team leaders got cake for him and we all pounced on him at 11:30. He was surprised. So I got a bit of cake even though it's not quite my birthday yet.

After a scary start to the week (Raini barely ate all weekend, and I wasn't sure she would be alive when I came home Monday night), this is turning out to be a good week.

I feel like things are beginning to turn around. Maybe it's the whole being 42 thing (yes, direct reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Now if a few other things can come together, I can really breath easy.

To sleep, perchance to dream

Dreams have so many meanings. We dream while asleep, while awake, and of what we want for our futures.

Altered states of consciousness. Sleep is one, where we drop from our usual beta level of brainwaves down through alpha to delta and theta. If you've got the right meditation, you can even move into gamma.

Not long after I moved to the cities, my depression manifested itself as waking up every hour. I got very little REM sleep, which meant I wasn't dreaming. During that time melatonin became the buzzword about getting to sleep. Since I was working at a nutrition center at the time, I had access to all the literature on it. I started taking it and was sleeping through the night, only to wake up once to go to the bathroom.

It seems like no one noticed my depression. I'd call myself a high functioning depressive, as much of an oxymoron as that sounds. I got out of bed and kept going because that was the only way I knew how to be. Working two full time jobs when I attempted the second time didn't leave a whole lot of room for not functioning. Lack of sleep didn't help any, either.

Sleep and altered states can have such an impact on our bodies. We need to dream in order to assimilate all that's happened during the day. No sleep, no assimilation, no genius breakthroughs either.

What's prompting this? The dreams I woke up to this morning and the morning before. This morning my mind was swirling about me not getting things done. I was asking people for help and wasn't getting any. The last thing I remember was seeing my dad and begging him, help me daddy. I was sobbing when I woke up.
The other dream was about his brother. In some ways the dream was a version of Heroes with my uncle in the Nathan role and me playing Clare. My uncle's been gone a couple years, the victim of liver disease because he drank himself to death. He didn't follow his dreams, and look where it got him.

I know the XPC is prompting some of the dreams. That's OK. I'd rather sort out some of the crap in my life through dreams than to have to slog through them consciously.

One of the things I do before I go to sleep at night is to set an intention. It goes like this. I intend to quickly and easily move into a deep, peaceful, healing, restorative sleep where unconscious and subconscious minds do their parallel processing and cross referencing (and working on my intentions) in the background while conscious mind and body sleep straight through till (morning or a specific time I want to get up, like 4:40 am), and we all dream on the high astral plain.

Why such a long intention? It accomplishes many thing. I want to go to sleep quickly and easily, which I do most nights. Deep sleep helps the body heal and restore itself. By telling the unconscious and subconscious minds to work in the background keeps them occupied without reminding me of all the things I need to do the next day. If they do insist on keeping me up, I have paper and pen next to my bed so I can write down what keeps popping up so I don't have to remember it, it's on paper. I'm giving myself a command to wake up at a certain time, or telling my body it can sleep in, cats howling at me to feed them be damned. Dreaming on the high astral plain tells me which astral level will keep the lower astral critters away from my etheric body while I'm out and about and keep my physical body safe.

I started this intention while I was in class for therapeutic coaching. The brain is a wonderful, plastic, pliable piece of wetware that can do so much if we give it the right instructions. Intentions are one way, visioning is another.

The visioning comes in because of where I'm at with my body. It's a conscious effort to stand up straight after years of protecting myself by slouching forward. With this accident, now is the time to make the physical corrections so I can stand up straight. In essence I will heal myself into straightness and strongness of body, which the mind and soul have attempted to do for years.

There's a company down the road that sells things like foam rollers, instruction manuals, exercise balls and the like. Since I'm a massage therapist, I can get a professional discount. See if I can sneak out early on Friday and go over there to get a roller, a stretching strap and instruction manuals to help me help myself.

One of the methods they recommend is the Franklin Method. For dancers, they practice all the time, but by the end of the season they are wrecks. Unlike athletes that practice, but then let the mind envision what the perfect movement is, dancers keep on dancing. Franklin brought in visioning to help them 'see' the perfect movement and perfect it in their heads before having their bodies do it.

If I can envision my body standing up straight, breathing and moving in an easy manner, then my body has a template to work from. I have given it a command, this is what I want to look like, feel like, be like. Things follow from there.

Muvement

Muvement on all sorts of fronts.

Muve, of course, refers to the Gruve device that lives on my hip most of the day and on a wristband at night. My current green goal is now up to 990 calories above my RMR, or resting metabolic rate. This is going to be challenging, especially on the weekends.

I changed my walking strategy to start incorporating the PACE program. To start, I'm doing 2 minutes of warm up, 3 minutes fast, 2 slow, 3 fast, 2 to cool down. I'm doing that three times a day, at least during the work week. I'm sweating when I get done with that. It shows up on the Gruve, too. If I can figure out how to capture that in a way I can upload here, I will.

Movement on the phone front. Since Qwest is dumping Sprint as their cell phone carrier, we have to switch to Verizon. Went and did that today. Now I just need Qwest to catch up with the change so I can put call forwarding on my account so I can still get all my calls while at work.

Since this is also a stand alone phone, I'm thinking I'll use that number as the contact info for writing business, for now. Or not.

Movement in back. When I went to see Dr. R Wednesday night, he couldn't get my back and neck to move. Locked up tight, in his words. So I went in this morning to put on the neurostim pads. We put them on my back in the area that wouldn't move, moved the cart close enough so I could crank up the stim as my back got used to it, and laid on the pads for a good half hour. Took the pads off, flopped on the table and both the back and neck let go. I felt like I could actually stand up straight.

Movement in the job front. I have, for the most part, finished going through the survey data and moving it into the global licensing spreadsheet. Next week we start uploading what I do have into the Access database and start playing with the queries to make sure they are written correctly. Should be interesting.

I now understand why IT projects seem to take longer than planned. Some of it is poor planning, not taking into account all of things you could be missing, or not being open to suggestions that would make the process easier.

There is no way I'll be done with this project in 5 weeks. My boss is meeting with the director next week to talk about which contractors she wants to keep and which to let go. I'm on the keep list.
The other thing working in my favor is that the VP over the area is also behind the greater software asset management idea, of which this is a part of. The VP agrees it should stay where it is, and is looking at long term funding for it out of his budget. With a little luck, this could turn into a full time permanent job. Well, as permanent as they get.

So... things are moving and gruving. I should get moving and do all the usual weekend chores I need to do.

Oops...

Should have read the ingredients on the flour bag before I used it. One of the last ingredients was white corn meal.

I discovered that this morning after waking up for the second night in a row with a gut ache that only comes from corn. The rest of this batch of gnocchi are going in the garbage.

Confounded rotten f'ing food allergies.

Next attempt at gnocchi will use potato flour and make sure the potatoes are well dried before mashing.

The blush sauce came out so-so. It got too thick, so I've been thinning it out with tomato soup. It tastes pretty good, just needs to be more of a sauce and not a glob. It does go well over almost anything, so I'll use what's left over some proper Tinkyada rice pasta that I know is safe.

Work continues. Hard to believe I'm in my 14th week there, out of my 20 week contract. Haven't heard anything either way about a contract extension, so I'll have to be patient.

Not much else doing. See what happens when Dr. R works on me tomorrow night.

No, even with the weather being decent the last few days, I have not brought him out of the garage yet. One, I haven't bought this year's tabs yet - I need to get for both him and Taez. Two, until we get a couple good rain storms to wash the slime off the road, I won't think about it. Three, I would prefer to have the roads swept so there's no loose gravel. Chael and I have stayed shiny side up, rubber side down and I intend to keep it that way.

Cooking day

Cooking and washing dishes are all I've done so far today. Yogurt is on the stove doing it's thing. I made my 'soup' for the week, which is a quarter cup each of canolli and black beans and a third cup each peas and carrots. I made, from scratch, hash browns. Made the gnocchi and had some for lunch.

Gnocchi... I need to work on the recipe. I baked up some sweet and yukon gold potatoes yesterday, put them in the fridge overnight. In order to mash them, since I don't have a ricer, I put them in the food processor. The issue came in that since I'm not using wheat flour, it took a lot of gluten free flour to even get the dough to somewhat of a consistency. As it is, it's more like cookie dough than pasta dough. Since I didn't want to put too much flour in, I decided to do a test and drop it in boiling water like dumplings.

It worked just fine. They boiled up amazingly fast - within two minutes or less. I grated some parmesan over them with a bit of butter and called it good. Tonight I'll make a blush sauce to put over them, then freeze the rest for another time.

Now if I can just rustle up enough energy to haul out garbage and recycling, then get the laundry done, I'll be in good shape.

When I did take a few minutes to sit down, I noticed a commercial for gel kitchen mats. Given how bad my bad hurts right now, that caught my attention. They aren't cheap - $100-$250 on their web site. Bed, Bath and Beyond does carry some for $100-200. I'm really tempted to get one, given how much I stand in my kitchen on the weekend.

It would also be cool to have one when I start standing at my desk. That's part of why I haven't started standing up yet, is how my back and feet feel when I've been standing for too long. Hmm, perhaps with the next insurance check I can purchase a small one that can go back and forth between work and home until I can afford to get a second one. Or, perhaps I can get one of my chiro's to give me a prescription for one so I can stand at work.

Things to contemplate.

O.U.C.H.

As in having to spend $500 to get my truck fixed. What started out as a simple front end and headlight alignment turned into a major ordeal. Somehow, Taez's front camber had never been adjusted in all of his 11 years. So, when they went to do it, they discovered the shipping blocks that keep things in line when the vehicle is moved from the factory to the local dealer were never removed. $100 just to get those things off.

Then it turns out the front brakes were within a millimeter of their last legs, so either I got new brakes put on today or I may not be stopping tomorrow. Joy.

To top things off, the U-joints on the drive shaft are about ready to go. That's another $250 that I'll have to do later. Today was bad enough.

I know Taez is at the point where he needs some work. The U joints, replace the high pressure power steering line so I don't have to keep feeding him power steering fluid, and new spark plugs with a tune up are just the tip of the iceberg. His tranny fluid needs to be changed, the differentials probably need some attention, who knows what else. For now, I'll nurse him though. See if getting this resume business off the ground will help.
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Not sure what Dr. M cracked loose last night, but I was an angry bitch when I got home. Between four screaming kids at Dr. M's office, him cracking my lower back and something else, I was screaming at the cats to shut up. Neither one obliged, so Raini almost, almost got thrown at the wall.

I'm usually pretty even tempered, but I was on a rampage last night. I am beginning to suspect I hold a lot of my anger in my hips and low back. Get those to move and the anger has a way to come forth. I'm so looking forward to having Dr. R take a shot at it on Wednesday, cause Dr. M is out of town next week.
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Now I feel like cooking. Gnocchi seems to be calling my name, along with hash browns. Thinking I'll bake some sweet and gold potatoes for both kinds of applications, and see what happens from there. Put a small roast in at the same time, supper will be ready by 6. Meat and potatoes, yum!

Another day

Just another day in paradise.

For some people, my life is a paradise. I have a job, I have income, I have options, possibilities and potential. I sometimes forget that.

Had some weird dreams lately. Strange enough that they've been waking me up either in a cold sweat or with my heart pounding. Dredging up people from my distant past, like the first guy I ever had a crush on 30+ years ago. As long as sub and unconscious minds are working out the issues, I don't mind the strangeness.

I'm finding that the music I loaded this weekend is helping with being brain fried. I'm listening to the Narada collections 1-5.
I'd forgotten how much some of the music moves me. Some of the songs are like old friends that seem so comfortable. There were tears in my eyes the first time I heard some of the music again, as it's been years since I listened to it. Yet I can still anticipate and play the song in my head as it's coming out of the earbuds, and hear the songs in my sleep. Maybe that's why the dreams are coming up with the old stuff.

TGIF. I am so looking forward to this weekend. To sleep in, get Taez's front end aligned so he quits vibrating, and get his headlights aligned so I can see in the dark. A run to Whole Foods for a major re-supply.

And more time to dream.

Brain fried so-so

For some reason today I'm not near as brain fried as I usually am after work. Not sure what's up with that, but I'll take it.

Thinking of brain fried, like the new icon? Not my most creative Photoshop effort, but it gets the idea across relatively quickly.

Not much new. Same old, same old at work, plowing through survey responses to get them in before we start deleting people's software.

The Gruve thing is going OK. I've been in the green most days, except for the days I didn't recharge the silly thing enough. Now I'm charging it daily, so it doesn't miss anything. I missed hitting green on Saturday by a measly 13 calories, which I more than made up for on Sunday. I'm still in the blue today, meaning I'm between 76-99% of my daily goal, which this week is 795 calories a day.

You would think with an almost 10 minute walk in from the parking garage, three 8 minute walks on my breaks and at lunch, and another almost 10 minute walk out (including six floors of stairs down) that I would easily hit my goal. Thing is, it's not going to get easier, because the calories go up every week if you hit green 8 out of the previous 14 days.

I suppose that means I need to start standing at my desk. Not something I want to do on a regular basis. I have considered getting an exercise ball to sit on, which would work my core muscles and help me sit up straighter. One thing at a time.

A good day

Today's been a good day, despite the time change. Because of that, I technically wasn't up until after 7:30 this morning. Talk about sleeping in... not. Got clothes washed, then started packing for my excursion this afternoon.

First was my platelet donation. Last one in, first one done. My time is down to 57 minutes. The head phlebotomist (aka the person who knows how to stick you with needles properly) was telling me they almost had to throw out my last donation.

Why? Because I gave way too many platelets. They want about 10.5 to the 11th (1,050,000,000,000 to the rest of us) platelets for a triple donation. My last one was 13 to the 11th, or a quadruple donation. His issue with me is that my platelet count hasn't been consistent - I've been all over from 439k to 505k per CC of blood. You would expect after two years of donating that I'd be somewhat consistent. My time hasn't changed, the amount of blood they go through varies by 100 cc, so something within me is making it fluctuate that wildly.

I asked him if the supplements Dr. M has me on might be part of the reason why it varies. He wasn't sure. So, I'm going to bring that up to Dr. M on Friday, see what he has to say.

So, I'm thinking I need to set an intention of consistently donating 10.5 to the 11th every time I donate.

I also need to set an intention so that all of the blood donation governing bodies get their stuff together and allow quad donations. The equipment can do the job, the programming doesn't need updating. All they need to do is pull a couple hundred cc's more plasma and there would be enough to do a quad. It's a matter of sitting down and writing out a clear, concise intention with a deadline.

After I got out of there, I headed to the Mall of America. I needed to get some new shoes, because my current shoes are hurting my knees. I needed to get a new cord for my iPod, because my old one is good enough to charge it, but not enough to make a connection to the computer to update it from iTunes. I stopped at the Qwest booth, because they are kicking over to Verizon for their wireless service, which means I need to get a new cell phone and change my phone plan because I'll lose my One Number service, boo. While I was there I also hit Torrid and a couple other places just to kill some time before I met P after her second job.

Finally met up with P. Gave her a pound of the XPC for her and the puppies. Then I came home, made sure both pairs of shoes fit. The iPod is updated with several CD's that I added to the mix, along with a new playlist of my favorite label, Narada.

Now I get to chill until it's time to go to bed and start all over again tomorrow.

Not my problem

Cable wise, that is.

Cable guy just left. The problems I've been having with the picture tiling and doing funky stuff has nothing to do with my set top box or wiring. Whew. The problem is at the building's box, because someone put an amplifier in the building box, not at the street level.

In essence, the amp boosted the signal too high with not enough time for it to settle down before it hit my cable box. If the amp had been put at the street branch, there would have been enough time for the signal to damp down and behave.

The cable guy knew immediately that it wasn't an inside issue, just looking at the numbers he was getting. So, he's going to take the maintenance guy to lunch to see if he can get him over here in the next week to move the amp out to the street.

Sweetness. If it's not fixed in the next week or two, I need to call in and ask what's going on. At least I don't have to pay for it, cause it's their equipment that's causing the problem.

With him been and gone, now I can get the rest of my day underway. I need to get groceries, a new battery for my landline phone, gas in Taez, maybe make another run to ARC. Then it's to buckle down and get stuff going with my writing business.

I've decided to name my business The Write Support. The name isn't taken in Minnesota, the last time I checked. I can get thewritesupport.biz for a web address. I can use PayPal to take credit cards for the time being. I just need to get the insurance check for my hours lost and multiple trips to see Dr. M so I can start the checking account.
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It's looking like I'm a good influence at work. My boss is the only woman team lead in her area. The other team lead has, in essence, started a good old boys club with his team. His abrogation of leadership has caused problems not only within the team but with other teams as well.

I encouraged her to start documenting what was going on and take it to HR. Present it to the director as, I've done everything I know to make the situation better and it hasn't made a difference, I need help. She presented it after we did our spiel with the numbers on Thursday. The director listened and actually scheduled an appointment with the HR rep, the other team lead, my boss and himself.

I also encouraged her to go to the HR rep before hand, to give him some background on the situation and to give him the names of other people who have seen the other team lead's behavior cause problems. She was seriously thinking about it when I left her yesterday.

That's the tricky part of being a woman in a predominantly male field - when do you speak up and when do you keep your mouth shut? Her team is at it's limit with the BS going on and are getting irritated with her for not doing anything. I think she needed the support of another woman in order to get moving. I've given her some outside perspective, different ways of presenting it and ideas of how to go forward. She has to do the work and be prepared for the backlash.

I'm doing my coaching work at work. Perhaps that's why I'm there.

Brain fried, part 2

Man, I could do without coming home brain fried every night. Part of it is repetition, doing the same copy-find-alt tab -arrow over-input-arrow back-alt tab-copy-alt tab-paste for hours on end.

Another part today was doing a minor overhaul on the Access database. Another meeting with Europe lead into them now wanting the database so they can start uploading all their stuff now. Given what I learned yesterday, I knew I had to add a couple more fields before I can even think about letting them have it.

So the database dude came over and we talked about adding the SMS version number, the AD group name, and a few other things. Next thing I know he's in my chair overhauling the database. The way he came up with makes more connections and allows us to pull queries that show missing data, mismatched data, etc.

So that means I need to go back and add more info to my spreadsheet. When I get that added for Europe, then I can do an upload of Europe's info and see if I can break the database with the queries we came up with.

This is one time when I don't know enough. Not that I want to know how SMS/SCMS and all that stuff works, leave that for the real geeks. It would be nice to have a better understanding of how this all ties together.

My boss and I met with the director yesterday to give him some preliminary numbers. Some things aren't too far out of whack, but Project Pro is completely upside down. At $532 a copy, that's gonna be a fun one to deal with. So the boss and I are going to sit down tomorrow and start planning time lines and actually using her copy of Project to plot things out.

Had to laugh at her, we were talking about the whole asset management thing. She quipped that I was the software asset management department. Well, I suppose that's good for job security.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here yawning, and it's only 6 pm.

Freakin' time change this weekend, too. Bah. Go from actually being light enough to see my way around in the morning without turning on the lights to having to turn them on again. I like my light in the morning, thank you!

So, if you don't hear anything out of me for more than a day or two, it's just cause I am too fried to think straight, let alone put two letters together.

XPC update

So, I've officially been on the XPC for a week. Started at a 1/4 teaspoon a day, ramping up to a 1/2 teaspoon today. Why the slow ramp up to a full teaspoon?

In the past, I've found that when I start taking something that helps my immune system work better, by taking the recommended amount from the start usually makes me sick, or in other words, brings on a healing crisis. My immune systems goes, 'Yippee, she's giving us what we need, let's go to town!' and starts cleaning up everything it can find. That overloads the rest of my system and makes me sick. I've had it happen with both Xango and Via Viente (both juice based supplements). I don't have time to be sick right now, and I don't want to cause any more chaos than I have to, so I'm taking this slowly.

In some ways, a healing crisis is a good thing - you know the product is working to make you healthier. If you know that it's a healing crisis, it's a good thing. If you're clueless about what's happening with your body, it can freak you out big time.

As it is, my body is processing through stuff. My cough came back for a couple days, and this weekend I was sneezing up a storm - my normal is 2-3, this was 5-10 at a time. I'm also running a slight fever - for me that's running around normal body temp, given my usual of 96.5. I'm willing to put up with stuff like this if in the long haul I'm healthier all around.

I've written previously about the toxins stored in the fat I'm letting go of. That's a big chunk of the reason why I started the XPC now. A stronger immune system can easily deal with the crap coming out. There are other things I'm hoping it will help with as well, like my allergies and food intolerances. One thing at a time.

Life otherwise is the same old, same old. Not much new.