It was worth it just to get outside my office

Why, yes, I did walk out the door in running clothes today. And then, in fact, I ran. I don't know how far* or how fast** it was, but I DO know how cold it was: 27 degrees, that's how cold. I clearly didn't pick the best day for this, but the fact is I didn't pick it; I just took advantage of my one moment this week when didn't need to be sitting at my stupid desk, grumbling about my stupid sore hip and earning my Grumpy money.

Oh, the run? It was fine. In fact, if I'm comparing it to other first-run-after-a-long-running-hiatus-es, it was probably the best one ever.

Back to work.

* More than one mile, less than two.
** Felt pretty fast, for me.

The wage-earner, on her photo shoot.

Oh, my aching…

So the problem I've been having lately is that every time I sit anywhere for about 20 minutes or so—you know, like, here at my desk, for example—my right hip starts aching. I've been reading about how sitting is killing everyone and we're all apparently supposed to get up for a break every 20 minutes anyway, so I'm considering that this might just be a blessing in disguise.

I'm also considering that it might be the worst thing that ever happened to anyone ever.

It's driving me nuts, because my work requires concentration—and has deadlines—and unhealthy though it may be, it would be really nice to be able to sit and focus for three or four hours straight.

I've wondered if a standing desk is a solution, but whenever I rig something like that up, I find it even more difficult and irritating to work for long periods of time. So I'm thinking very seriously about a kneeling chair. Would that help? Does anyone have any experience using them?

The grumpy old lady on her photo shoot.

Walking out the front door is the hard part

The weather has been pretty nice, and I'm seeing more runners than ever outside. It looks…fun. (What's that? Nostalgia for running? Is this because deep down I want to run 100 miles? That's so weird.) But twice this week I've decided to go for a short run and then not actually done it. I'm not sure exactly what the hesitation is.

Well, okay. Part of it is my new-found conviction that too much exercise is not at all beneficial, and I've been reading about how "chronic cardio" is actually bad for you. And I'm already really happy with my yoga classes, swim posse, and occasional weight-lifting session. On the other hand, the kind of running I always enjoyed most was the long, slow kind, and I know from my heart-rate-monitor-wearing days that I can do that well below the cardio range—maybe even more easily now that I weigh 30 pounds less. Plus, I used to like running, and surely the fun factor counts for something.

Okay. I've talked myself into it. The goal for this week is to walk out the front door in running clothes and see what happens.

The runner on her photo shoot.

Today's soapbox speech

One of my jobs (for Grumpy) is to listen to companies' quarterly earnings conference calls and edit the transcripts. I actually enjoy this a lot, and pretty often I use the information in them for my own investing decisions. Today I was slated to hear the earnings call for a midsized pharmaceutical company, and since I don't currently own any pharmaceutical stock, I was curious to see if it was at all promising.

Sigh. Here are some of the diseases the company makes drugs for: Depression. Fibromyalgia. Alzheimer's. Irritable bowel. Anxiety. High blood pressure.

Diseases linked to diet. Diseases almost no one should have to suffer with! Here's a multimillion-dollar business that stays afloat simply because people don't understand what kind of food is good for them and what kind of power their food has to make them sick.

Like the evil cereal and tobacco companies, this one's days are numbered. (Sell! Sell!)

I'm an optimist, but I really think it's about five more years until we reach a turning point where high-quality organic food is affordable and easy to find—and diseases that still need curing are rare and expensive.

The optimist on her photo shoot. Hope you can see it now!

Pictures!

Last night I dragged my camera, tripod, and family to a scenic location to see if I could get professional-looking portraits of us without actually having any professionals around anywhere. It was too cloudy to get the magic-hour sunlight I wanted, but, still, I don't think we did half bad. (Although someone should probably take away my Picasa special effects.)

I would probably do this once a week if my family would stand for it.

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Why we clean kitchens

I was ranting to M.H. about the criminally flawed eating recommendations that have been pushed on Americans since the '70s (and if you were reading Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, as I am, you would be ranting about the same thing, so shut up) and I realized that rather than just sitting there, I could be ranting while cleaning out the kitchen cupboard that's been bugging me lately.

M.H. thought we might as well empty the whole thing out and start fresh, and after we did that, we realized that there were a couple of other cupboards filled with similar items, and we might as well empty those out, too, if we were going to be reorganizing.

You can guess where this ended: Three hours later, the entire kitchen was reorganized, a long-forgotten paper towel rack was installed, everything was shiny, and I had 22 new items to give to charity. A garage cleaning a few weeks ago yielded 40 more giveaway items, and I've also got 16 outgrown/opposite-of-outgrown items of clothing to give away. One trip to the Montana Rescue Mission, and I'll be ninety percent of the way to my goal. Since I took eBay out of the equation, getting rid of extraneous junk has been a snap!

But that's not the moral of this blog post. The moral of this blog post is that any book that gets you so fired up that simply talking about it produces the fuel for a three-hour organizing juggernaut is a good book that a lot of people should take a look at.

Where bad ideas come from

I saw a picture on Facebook from the Yellowstone-Teton 100-miler, a young guy running through gorgeous scenery. Well, Yellowstone to Teton? It would be gorgeous. I'd never heard of the race, which is odd since it's relatively local.

I Googled it and found some old results. Huh, looks like it just started in 2011. Checked out how many participants there were and their finishing times—only a handful, no one I knew, and man it takes a long time to run 100 miles. There was a 50-miler, too, but of course then you don't get to run from Yellowstone Park to the foot of the Grand Tetons.

Downhill all the way.

Went to the official website. Looked at pictures. Found a course map and an elevation chart. Looked at the dates and price.

THEN I realized I was doing all this curiosity-satisfying with an enormous grin on my face. How stupid is that? I don't even run anymore.

Weird Al time

Oh, can you even believe Dex is sick? Me NEITHER. Except that I'm so used to him being sick that, in a way, each passing day when he was not sick was kind of a delightful surprise. (Tinged, of course, with satisfaction at my own cleverness in making him drink all that tea.)

But now—filled with sorrow and sympathy rather than happy smugness—I am medicating his little buns off and taking him in half an hour to a Weird Al concert. This is such bad timing, even for the fourth-biggest Weird Al fan* in our family of four. I certainly hope he can rally enough to have fun.


* We ranked our fandom yesterday, and it goes M.H., Mik, me, Dex. Mik says he'd definitely be the biggest fan if only he'd been alive to fully appreciate all the '80s parodies.

And I'm extra special, too

What a pantywaist!

I was going to skip insane-lady yoga tonight, but my dear husband told me I'd regret it if I did and then called me "a pantywaist."

pantywaist. n. A child's undergarment consisting of a shirt and pants buttoned together at the waist. 

That definition seems archaic, since I have never heard of a modern child being dressed in such a garment. But from this old ad I found, one can clearly infer that pantywaist in the modern sense must mean a content youthful person with well-managed hair who cares about his/her health, is comfortable in his/her own skin, and puts a premium on comfort and value. Plus: sexy knees.

Awww. He knows me so well.

Free triathlon advice, just ask

My gym has a new "swimming class"; it's kind of like a mini masters team, but free, and with no ambition to be competitive. Just a bunch of people who get together to swim, and an instructor who brings laminated cards with the workouts. Perfect!

I found the whole thing shockingly exhausting this morning, so there's reason enough right there to keep going. (How long has it been since I've swum??) But the really nice thing was getting to meet some other swimmers, especially a woman about my age who's training for an Ironman next July. I told her I'd love to hear all about her training, and she told me she'd love to ask me for advice. I said, "Please do, because there's nothing I enjoy talking about more!" I think this was true. The trick will be getting me to stop, really.

This is still not a triathlon blog, but the Ironman does fall under TheBombDotMom umbrella, so if you'd like advice on how to finish one, you know who to come to.

Formerly Zero to 140.6

I'm playing around with my blog name again, so don't freak out if you see this in your reader and have no idea where "TheBombDotMom" came from.

Where did TheBombDotMom come from? Well, friends, that's what I say to my kids when something is so awesome that I want to see their little eyes roll into the backs of their little heads.

I like it as a blog name, though, because pretty much everything I do is TheBombDotMom. Here's all the proof you need: I was into knitting before it was cool. I became a home-based freelancer before it was cool. I promoted my husband* to full-time homemaker before it was cool. And now I'm really into eating Paleo, so I give it about another year before all the celebrities are doing it.


* And he self-published a book before it was cool, so you can tell I married well.