More on the art show

Sunday: Yoga 15 minutes, weights 20 minutes, walk 1.2 miles

I forgot to post the picture of my art show table:

I feel so much better today; I slept a normal amount and woke up a normal human. I’m going to assume yesterday’s exhaustion was mostly about the stress of getting this all together and then spending so many hours talking to people.

And I REALLY want to do this again. I’m going to try to figure out how to be a little more professional—like how to finish and frame things so that people can actually hang them up. (The few that are framed were ones where I ripped out ancient family photos and replaced them with painted paper.) Everything you see here was propped up with bookends and/or rocks, so honestly my first task is to buy some display easels. M.H. needs them for his book-selling events anyway.

Art show!

Tuesday: Yoga 15 minutes, walk 1.2 miles
Wednesday: Yoga 15 minutes, walk 1 mile
Thursday: Yoga 15 minutes, walk ??
Friday: Yoga 15 minutes, walk ??
Saturday: Yoga 15 minutes, walk 1.2 miles

Yesterday was Art Walk, where I had a table among about 20 other artists with a bunch of my abstract acrylic paintings. I was thrilled; I sold two of them for actual money and traded one to another artist for something cool. But I am also EXHAUSTED—I don’t know if it was from the stress of getting everything ready and named and set up, the physical exertion of doing all that, or just the fact of having to spend four hours straight talking to people.

At any rate I was in bed by 9 and slept until almost 8 a.m., and still I’m tired to a degree that I wonder if I’m coming down with something or maybe just have reached an age of irreversible decline and infirmity.

Being part of the “art community” in town has been really rewarding, and I learned a lot yesterday. For one thing, I found out that there are a few other annual shows that I could participate in if I wanted. To do that I think it would be good to improve my presentation somewhat and be a lot more deliberate in trying to make quality pieces. On the other hand, there’s really nothing stopping me from just continuing to slap paint around on things and then trying to sell them.

October’s challenge

Saturday: Rest
Sunday: Walk 1 mile
Monday: Yoga 15 minutes, walk 1.2 miles

Welcome to the Month of Achilles Healing! (It’s October 2, but I just decided.) My plan resolution challenge is that every day for the next 30 days, I will:

• Use the Thumper on my Achilles
• Go for a short walk
• Stretch
• Use infrared light on my Achilles
• Stretch with the brace my sister sent me

(It looks like this.)

I’m still chasing the high of that glorious day several weeks ago when my feet just didn’t hurt. 

Some temporary chaos

Saturday: So much yardwork
Sunday: Yoga 30 minutes, so much yardwork
Monday: So much yardwork
Tuesday: So much yardwork
Wednesday: So much yardwork
Thursday: So much yardwork
Friday: Yoga 20 minutes

I am happy our landscaping project has started, but right now it’s messing up my life a bit.

Mud.

It’s so stressful to have loud noises and constant beeping coming from the back yard, I don’t know how to oversee what’s going on and make sure it’s all OK without making a nuisance of myself, I’m putting in a lot of time “helping” with the cleanup and waste disposal but not actually seeming to achieve all that much, I’m worried about throwing out my back from picking so much stuff up off the ground, and I’ve been skipping most of my other exercise. Oh, and I put “free rock” on Facebook Marketplace, which means I’ve also been juggling dozens of daily interruptions from people messaging me and ringing the doorbell. (Yet the rock never seems to totally go away.)

My Achilles have been particularly painful lately, and I don’t know if it’s from not taking my short morning walks, not stretching as much, eating a bit worse than usual, or some combination of that. Actually I’ve been surprised at how much regular walking seemed to make things better and not worse—that should probably be the priority. I just keep spending my entire morning in the yard and then forgetting to ever go outside again.

Interruptus

Friday: Walk 1.2 miles
Saturday: Yoga 35 minutes, walk 2.1 miles
Sunday: Weights 20 minutes
Monday: Yoga 35 minutes
Tuesday: Walk 1.5 miles

I just decided to write out a to-do list for today, and when I grabbed my scratch paper, there sat yesterday’s list with NOTHING crossed off. So that will also do for today. Sigh.

The problem is that I am trying to give away the TONS of river rocks in my back yard in preparation for landscaping. This entails having Facebook open almost constantly and managing literally dozens of people messaging me, plus random people knocking on the front door. It’s going to save us quite a bit of money in the end because the rocks won’t have to be hauled to the dump, so it is worth it. 

But on the other hand, I am so very easily distracted. Every ding and interruption derails me for 5 to 60 minutes, which you can imagine is not conducive to working at my desk. Adding “Don’t get sidetracked” to the list as we speak.

It’s happening

Monday: Walk 1.2 miles, walk 1.5 miles
Tuesday: Yoga 25 minutes, meditate 10 minutes 
Wednesday: Weights 20 minutes, meditate 10 minutes, walk 1.5 miles
Thursday: Walk 1.5 miles

We met with our landscaper yesterday, and the lawn overhaul is beginning as soon as Monday! I’m so excited; there’s going to be a greenhouse and a ton of garden space, and everything else is going to be sustainable. I have so much to learn about gardening between now and next spring—or maybe next winter, since…greenhouse! 

I’m pleased with my headstand bench—I have been wanting to do inversions again, and this is a nice intermediate step toward “real” headstands and handstands.

Weekend fun

Thursday: Walk 1 mile
Friday: Walk 1.5 miles
Saturday: Walk 1.5 miles, hike 2.5 miles
Sunday: Rest

I ended my “Whole30” on Friday after 10 days, but in a way it’s all part of the plan: Eat according to the plan at home and resist eating out for reasons of laziness, but when something fun comes up, don’t worry about it too much.

This weekend’s fun involved a hike, a waterfall, a Shakespeare in the Parks performance, seeing Dexter, a burrito, a sub sandwich, and many snacks. No regrets, although I actually do feel like crap this morning. According to SnoreLab (and my memories, and my throat), I snored with my mouth open all night and woke up like eight times. Now I feel tired and dehydrated and like fall allergies just reared their ugly heads. I tried doing a little yoga this morning but gave up within five minutes.

I’m on the verge of embarking on an editing project that will mean 20 additional hours of work each week. This is technically doable, and I want to do it, but it’s basically taking me all the way to full time for about six to ten months (or more, depending on my other clients). I’ve been thinking through how that’s going to fit into my life—what needs to go and what needs to stay. Somehow I need to doing the food and exercise that is actually starting to make me better…

Skies have cleared

Monday: Walk 1.5 miles
Tuesday: Rest
Wednesday: Yoga 45 minutes, walk 1.5 miles

Yesterday the smoke in town was TERRIBLE, and I also felt kind of crappy. Today he skies cleared up, I feel great, and I gave myself the gift of not going to the yoga class that has gotten so annoying.

I was on a roll with creative pursuits this weekend and made a useful thing out of old T-shirts:

I need to remember that if I’m (1) caught up with work and (2) actually then step away from my desk, I get to do fun things.

Having a nice weekend

Saturday: Yoga 35 minutes, meditate 10 minutes
Sunday: Walk 1.5 miles 

Here’s the result of art lesson 2:

I actually worked on three paintings today, since I feel inspired and am having an AGGRESSIVELY relaxing weekend. It’s clear to me that my brain is continuing to wake up (this is Whole30 Day 5).

Yoga is great, but I’m thinking it probably shouldn’t come at the expense of walking, at least until walking gets less challenging (yes, I said “challenging”). I can’t quite put my finger on what is hard about it. It’s partly that my Achilles often hurt, especially on any kind of upward incline, but really I think I’m just out of shape to a ridiculous degree. So in the name of tendon healing I don’t want to go any farther, but in the name of getting my body good at walking again, I think I’d better make sure I at least do my short stroll every day.

Day 1, Day 3, Day 20

Thursday: Walk 1.5 miles
Friday: Walk 1.5 miles

This is Day 1 of an online abstract art class I’m taking. The first assignment was to tape off a piece of paper and then play around with a limited color palette. The class is called “Find Your Joy” so in theory we are just supposed to be having fun and enjoying the process, but lately I can’t seem to figure out how to make any marks with a paintbrush that I enjoy. It used to be that everything I painted was a delirious free-for-all, but this was not all that exciting:

BUT…this is Day 3 of the Whole30, and I really do think I feel my brain waking up again, so maybe things will get better.

And finally this is Day 20 of a work marathon—I just looked back, and I haven’t had a day off since August 12. But I am taking the entire weekend off, with plans to see friends, do more painting, and chop up a bunch of T-shirts to make T-shirt yarn. I eventually want to use it to crochet a rustic basket in which I can gather all the garden produce I will have this time next year.

Whoa

Monday: Yoga 30 minutes, walk 1.5 miles
Tuesday: Weights 20 minutes, walk 1.2 miles 

I have been faithfully using the Thumper on my Achilles and calf and have also been pretty good about taking a slow walk every day. Yesterday a miracle occurred and my Achilles stopped hurting.

I’m not sure exactly how to say what I’m about to try to say. But I think when you’ve lived with a pain for long enough—no matter how mild—it just becomes part of your life and actually starts to condition you. So I might say my Achilles feel pretty good today, and that’s true in relative terms, but in the back of my mind of course they’re still going to hurt when I get up after sitting for a while. Or go down stairs. Or walk for any distance. That’s just a given. Only yesterday some of those things didn’t actually hurt at all, and I started realizing that I have been avoiding or delaying standing up, using the stairs, and walking because of the anticipated pain. My pain was slowly training me to be more sedentary.

So yesterday was fantastic and eye-opening. And just to be clear, my Achilles do kind of hurt again today, but nothing like this has happened in four or five years, so surely it points toward healing.

A fresh hell

Friday: Walk 1.2 miles
Saturday: Walk 1.5 miles
Sunday: Walk 1.5 miles

Yesterday the first day in a while that I haven’t been migrainey, but I’ve still decided not to push it (see definitions). That’s partly because I haven’t had a day off work in weeks, and that seems enough stress. 

I’m not sure what happened to me last week—probably a hormone freakout, because on top of headaches I was having terrible hot flashes, which is an exciting new symptom. My strategy for survival was desperately avoiding getting hot, even a little, because a little hot would turn into a lot hot, which would then blossom into a headache.

Definitions:

push it (v): Do literally anything physical beyond a very slow morning walk. 

Bad night

Tuesday: Rest 

I call it “rest” but really it’s: horrible night of sleep, very early morning, and tons to do today.

We went to bed super-early last night because we had to be up at 4:30 to take Mik to the airport. But the power went out sometime before 11, causing a fire alarm to start making a horrible noise, which woke me up and started me worrying about all the food in the freezer, whether we’d be able to cook Mik breakfast, global warming, etc. So I slept on and off after that, but then starting around 2 the power turned on and off three separate times—and every time it did it would cause M.H.’s phone to light up the room, the Sleep Number bed to make a loud clunking noise, and the fire alarm to switch from its horrible but relatively quiet growl to a loud “low battery” beep every 30 seconds. I must have eventually gotten back to sleep because when the alarm finally went off I was in the middle of a nightmare.

(Obviously M.H. slept peacefully through it all. Not jealous.)

But then I had to give my baby back to his college AND I theoretically have to work all day. Grumpy face.

Transitioning

Saturday: Walk 1.2 miles
Sunday: Walk 1.2 miles
Monday: Walk 1.3 miles

Mik goes back to college tomorrow, and I WOULD go straight back into Whole30ing, but we have a refrigerator full of leftover taco bar at the moment, so it’s going to take a few days. I also really want to do more on the exercise front again, but I haven’t really been feeling that great. I’m not sick, but I definitely don’t feel 100% well either. Hopefully it’s just from lots of gluten and time at my desk, rather than a virus. (Actually, as I think about it for a hot second, I kind of hope it’s from a virus and not just from a week of worse eating/movement, because that would mean there’s absolutely no margin for lifestyle error anymore in my life, and that would be RIDICULOUS.)

The tiny bit of extra walking this morning was because as I was approaching my house, I saw two kids run over to our Little Free Library. I took a detour so they would have a chance to look without me scaring them off. :)