Posts from — March 2010

photo by anthimeria

I’m so glad so many of you agree on the whole cigarette smoke invading your personal space rant. It makes me feel a little less crazy for screaming about it each and every time my neighbor lights up. A little less.

I’d like to start this post by apologizing for how short it is. (And, I’ll admit, not overly informative in an educational sort of way.) Can I just say that it’s one of those weeks? And leave it at that?

(Stupid, Tracey, never apologize on a blog. It’s like telling everyone to stop reading right now. There, you’ve done it, you’ve scared away all of your readers.)

If you’re still with me, I thought I’d leave you with my latest breakfast obsession a habit I must break ASAP.

[Read more →]

photo by reynys

I’m going to take a stand on this soapbox here for a minute. One, because I feel a lot taller than you all and that makes me feel more important. Two, because it’s my blog. And three, because there’s something that irks me and deserves a post. And entire post.

(Disclaimer: If what I’m about to say applies to you, I in no way mean you’re a horrible person. You’re not even a bad person. You’re really nice. I mean that. So don’t take it personally. Consider this rant a live-and-learn moment. Or read one of my other posts. Your choice.)

I thought that I’d take on smokers today. Because why not? The longer I’ve lived in apartments, the lower my tolerance has become for cigarettes. Since this is really a health blog, I’ll start with the fact that smoking kills. Big surprise. (And if you thought that was a big surprise, you may need to go back to school. Or watch TV. Or talk to other humans.) It also harms the health of innocent bystanders in the form of secondhand smoke. And even the little grubby particles left on furniture and clothing are no good for our lungs. So, yeah, in a nutshell it sucks for all parties involved.

Now that we’ve cleared up the obvious, let’s move on to logistics.

[Read more →]

I’m going to be honest: I’m exhausted. And yes I understand I say that way too often. Take it up with my body. It’s the one that needs 10 hours of sleep to feel even mildly coherent.

I didn’t get much sleep last night. It was one of those nights where I tossed and turned and laid awake into the wee hours. (As an aside, this is the only instance I’m happy to be too blind to see the clock. Staring at the numbers and willing them to change is so third grade for me.) When I finally did fall asleep, it was one of those lightly dozing kind of rests where you wake up every so often to whatever noise is outside (ahem, pointless motorcycles that had to rev their engines over and over and over and over throughout the night).

So, yeah, it was cool that I got to bed at all. But very not cool that I awoke about a gazillion times during the night—and am still exhausted all day. Let’s go with that. Here are some other cool and really not cool things about my day:

[Read more →]

photo by shaletann
By the way, how pretty is that photo?

First, a brief note:

Daylight Savings, I curse the day George Vernon Hudson—devil that he is—created you. Sure, an extra hour of sunlight at night is kind of nice. And I do like being able to see my own feet when I wake up (winter’s darkness at 7 a.m. isn’t such a great idea for klutzes like me who make a habit of stubbing their toes on bed frames). But this spring forward stuff? Not cool.

The trickery that was this Sunday morning? You know, me waking up at 10:30 feeling frazzled and lazy and still exhausted? Deceitful! And this business of 9 p.m. coming faster than I could eat dinner? Not fair.

So here’s the deal: You can still do your thing every fall, when we’ll gain an hour of sleep. But leave spring alone. Capiche? Good.

Back to the regularly scheduled programming:

As you can tell, I’m still a little off from this whole time change. I feel like my mother when we used to travel cross country. She’d spend the whole vacation reminding us what time it was at home. And when we got back home, she’d remind us what time it was where we just came from. Well, I keep feeling like I’m just a little behind. (But that could be due to the fact that I got sucked into Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and time kind of raced by.)

That’s not all I did this weekend.

[Read more →]

photo by merlijn hoek

Yawn. Oh, sorry, that was rude. It’s just that I’m still a little groggy from doing absolutely nothing at all last night. (Yeah, not sure how that works out but who am I to question the chronically sleepy body this brain came with?) Giant glass of ice water and bowl of oats to the rescue.

And, yeah, coffee would be nice. Ahem, The Man, it would be nice to have a cup of coffee. (See above.) Hello?

Oh whatever.

Remember way back when—yesterday—when I said I’d reveal the truths to my mysterious lies? Well, I lied. (Ha! That’s the beauty of having a blog. You can do whatever you want, like lie about a lying post. Incidentally, you can also post a photo of the crazy bruises you got yesterday from walking into the door twice, but that would just make you look like a total klutz.)

I’m not trying to annoy you—no, really, I’m not. I just figured I’d practice this great storytelling thingy I’m working on called suspense. So I might be failing, but go with me on this one. You can expect a great reveal, or at least a moderately fun one, on Monday.

Before I head out for a double belated family get-together—as in the snow cancelled our pre-Christmas plans as well as our rescheduled post-Christmas plans and we’re now celebrating Christmas, two birthdays, Easter, and Fourth of July just to be safe—I wanted to clear something up.

[Read more →]

photo by catdancing

When I was 9, I almost won the greatest prize my town ever created.

The day was muggy and hot, the kind that makes your thighs stick to a chair. My parents and I got to the fair early, so by the time the contest started, my hair clung to my face with sweat and the tops of my shoulders were pink.

It started with a cold cherry-blackberry pie that I dug into when Mrs. Martin—the school music teacher with stringy chocolate hair and manly ankles—clanked the bell and yelled, “Go!”

I remember the first sour bite. The soft sweet crust. After that it was a blur. By the fifth pie, the gold-colored plastic trophy was mine. I could see it there—sitting on the picnic table across from where the old men gathered with cans of cheap beer—and knew it was mine. I’d put it on my bureau where I could see it from my bed, I though. Scratch that. I’d put it in the closet. That way my little sister wouldn’t steal it or break it or color it in with Sharpies. Yes, the closet.

And then Mark Lewis ruined it all.

[Read more →]

photo by specialkrb

Thanks for all of your great comments on yesterday’s funny gym post. I’m thankful I don’t go to the same gym as some of you. Scary things happen.

In other news, I had all intentions of planning out my meals for the week and sticking to the list strictly—like my life depended on it. But you know what? When you’re only a mildly good cook (or a mildly sucky one, depending on how you look at things) you can’t count on not screwing things up. Like the night I burnt the roasting eggplant. Or when The Man and I got home at 8 p.m. one night and just felt like a bowl of cereal.

I’m telling you this because despite my planning and my lack of follow through, we’ve actually used up all of our groceries without throwing away some vegetables that had started to decompose in the far reaches of our fridge. Sounds like no big deal, right? Well, maybe for you. But for The Man and I things seem to spoil in warp speed. (OK, we might settle for cereal too many nights a week. I swear that will change as soon as I quit my job and become a professional socialite. I’m right on that…)

Though we didn’t fail at our stick-to-the-grocery-list plan this time, we didn’t 100 percent succeed either. But here’s the best part: We’re going to try again and again and again until we get it right. Don’t you love how life is like that? You don’t get thrown out for messing up or being lackluster. And as The Man told me a few nights ago: The world isn’t going to end if the eggplant burns. (Though I did spend a good deal of time arguing that it might.)

Here’s where I turn this food-related post into a life lesson (marvel at my cleverness): If you fall flat on your butt and fail, so what? Pick yourself up, throw out the blackened eggplant dust yourself off, and give it another go.

I’m logging off wonderful blog readers (did I ever tell you how super you are?). The Man has some work to do and since we’re one computer short—no, it didn’t die. It’s just in the hospital getting some diagnostics done—he gets dibs on it.

What’s your burnt eggplant moment? And, no, it doesn’t have to be related to food. I have many failures in other areas of my life. But we don’t have to talk about that here. Cough, knees. Cough, cough.

photo by steve & jenna copley

The gym’s a silly place if you really pay attention. Because Wednesday is nothing more than a reminder there are still two more days to the workweek, I thought some musings might make for an entertaining break:

1. Old women have confidence, but sometimes that’s not a good thing. Eighty-year-old fake-n-baked woman at my gym with strange stomach wrinkles who wears a white sports bra and old spandex, I’m looking at you.

2. Leg presses tone your butt. Just when you think you’ve pumped your quads into submission you feel a deep ache in the butt. Yup, the exercise works that bigtime.

3. If you plan on doing reverse crunches, yoga, or other twisty poses, loose shorts aren’t the best idea. Thirtysomething woman who wears short shorts (and, thankfully, underwear) to contort, I’m talking to you.

4. Vitamins, protein shakes, workout clothes, and water double in price when they enter a gym.

5. 7 pm is the worst time to hit the gym if you plan to use cardio equipment, free weights, weight machines, Bosu balls, exercise balls, the exercise mat…

[Read more →]

photo by digimist

There are usually four ways I react to scientific studies.

The first, is what I call No Duh. That’s what I felt when I read about researchers who actually spent money to learn high heels can cause heel and ankle pain. Obviously these were men.

The second is what I call No Way! As in: Really? I never in a million years would have guessed that and yet it’s right here on my computer screen. It’s usually accompanied by wide eyes and a dropped jaw.

The third, I like to call Not Again… These are the studies that deem a formerly evil thing (a food, action, habit, you name it) really, really, ridiculously good for your health. You can spot these by the key words “surprise,” “astonishingly,” and “changes everything we thought about…”

The fourth is called Errr? That’s the sound I make when I read one of these studies that doesn’t make any logical sense. That’s the type of study I read about on the New York Times today.

The study involved 19,220 women age 39 and older. The researchers followed their drinking habits for 13 years then categorized the women as light or regular drinkers. Ready for the Errr? moment? The nondrinkers in the group gained more weight (nine pounds) over the years than those who imbibed (three pounds). The chances of being overweight were 30 percent lower for drinkers than teetotalers.

[Read more →]

photo by -maria-

For doing absolutely nothing at all, I had a pretty productive weekend. Sorta. I may have taken it easy a bit, but I did get to the gym (yes, that’s a big, fat positive DID), read a good book, and left my apartment clean enough that you could eat off its floors. (Though I’d advise against that.)

Of course on Sunday night I was glued to the television for the Academy Awards. Ever since I was old enough to realize movies were made by directors and film crews, and that the people on the screen are just playing pretend, I’ve been a huge fan of the yearly Oscars hoopla. My sister and I would always tear out the Oscar ballot Entertainment Weekly published back in the day (this was back before the magical Internet made it possible to learn every single thing about a movie without seeing it; I’m not sure if the magazine publishes this list anymore). We’d make our guesses and watch Oscar night as names were called.

I was there the night Gwyneth Paltrow in her bubblegum pink dress won for Shakespeare in Love. I watched as Roberto Benigni climbed across seat backs to accept the award for his role in Life is Beautiful. And I remember when Adrian Brody won for his role in The Pianist and planted a big wet one on Halle Berry. I could go on and bore you until you clicked away, but that’s not good blogging is it?

So I’ll just say I really enjoy the Oscars. [Read more →]