And hopefully I won’t regret this later.

Spent Fri/Sat/Sun a.m. in the big city with my female kidlet and someone I’ve been close friends with since grade 2 (we were besties in High School). For those of you who do math, that’s about 40 some-odd years of friendship.

(Being the introvert I am, I don’t have a lot of friends but those I have, I KEEP. So be warned, if I ever do call you a close friend, it’s a life sentence.)

We shopped, we ate, we walked and walked and walked and walked. 15K on Saturday alone. I shudder to think of the kilometers we logged at the One of a Kind Show on Friday. I don’t have the stats ‘cos CJ wasn’t wearing her pedometer then. Too bad. We saw a movie, The Blind Side. CJ and I let the Jemster pick it out. Good call. We all enjoyed it, even if it was formulaic. Then went back to CJ’s condo after supper and continued the Sandra Bullock film festival (after decompressing in the hot tub) by watching The Proposal. Damn, that woman looks good! Sandra Bullock’s trainer: CALL ME, OK?

I bought another book on Time Management (er…Action Management), Getting Things Done. Now to find time to read it. And apply it. So I don’t spend any more glorious weekends like this wondering if I made a mistake by not cancelling and getting caught up at the office instead. I may have made a mistake but I won’t regret it. Nope, not ever.

Yeppers….it is the dreaded mental-pause for sure.
Finally. I say finally because my younger sisters have been complaining of this stuff for years already, so I have been anticipating for quite a while now.

Hot flashes – experiencing about a half dozen or so a day. Very brief but very warm. Face flushes a bit and I get damp on my face and neck. Nothing like what I was expecting. From listening to my mom and grandmother I was expecting to SUFFER, BABY but so far it’s not really that bad. I fervently hope though, that it gets no worse.

In a way, I’ve actually been feeling better since the hot flashes began. All summer I was kinda in a mental fog. Finding it hard to stay focused. A real lack of physical and mental energy. Lately though (the last couple of weeks, same time frame as the hot flashes), my energy levels have been quite good and I am mentally more alert and my focus is coming back.

This just lends more credence to my little pet hypothesis that menopause is a kind of reverse puberty with all the same horrors and hopefully, joys.

Think about it:

At the beginning of a female’s fertility cycle, she resents the changes her body is going through, her emotions go haywire, and she thinks she is losing her mind.

Then she settles into her new “normal”, and begins to actually enjoy this phase of her life.

Then she gets pregnant, resents the changes her body is going through, her emotions go haywire, and she thinks she is losing her mind.

At the end of her cycle, she once more resents the changes her body is going through, her emotions go haywire, and she thinks she is losing her mind, YET AGAIN.

Which means I should, at the end of this, come into a new “normal” – which I hope, pray, and suspect is going to be similar to the carefree, careless joys of pre-adolescent girlhood when you really didn’t care at all about boys or what they or anybody else thought or expected of you, and you just went out and had lots of fun exploring the world!

Despite being genetically and culturally programmed to clean to a higher standard than a normal human being (I’m Dutch on both sides), I loath cleaning. I love a clean home, but I loath cleaning.

I loath the time it takes. I loath that it doesn’t last for more than a few days (or hours, when the kids were little). I loath the time it takes from more interesting and productive pursuits – like knitting, cooking or watching Slice. (My vice IS Slice.) I loath that I am being judged on how clean my home is (or isn’t). Did I mention I loath the time it takes?

But a clean home is so peaceful, so right, so comfortable, so welcoming, so…clean. So clean I must unless I can coerce someone else to do it for me. There was a time that I actually paid someone to clean my home. That lasted for a few short years back when the kids were teens. Now referred to as that time “Mizz D Was So Anemic She Could Have Died.” Thankfully I didn’t die, but IF I HAD DIED, AT LEAST MY HOUSE WOULD HAVE BEEN CLEAN. (And Dutch women everywhere can understand this sentiment. In fact next time I am going to Holland, I am going to check out the graveyards because I am sure there is a line on Dutch womens’ tombstones that says something to the effect that they wish they had spent more time cleaning.)

So, blood iron levels restored (thanks to a hysterectomy and Floradix Formula), I have no more excuses for poor housekeeping (according to Dutch women everywhere) so I am coming up with ways to make it, shall we say, more sporting – and thus, hopefully more tolerable.

I came up with the Housework Game Version 2: “How much housework can I get done in an hour?” I can do anything for an hour, right? I set the stove clock and I’m off and running.

Today I managed to:

• vacuum the living room, TV room, kitchen, hallway, stairs, bedroom and upstairs bathroom
• clean upstairs bathroom
• wash kitchen floor

All with 2 minutes to spare on the clock.

Version 1 debuted a few years back – before I knew I was already a citizen of the foggy world of Anemia. It was called “How much housework can I get done before I finish this honkin‘ big glass of red wine?” The beauty of this game was that, by the time the glass was finished, I was ready to pour another and keep on cleanin‘. Yeah, good times. By the time the house was sparkling, I was too.

Now I am an abstainer so I need to come up with other ways to get the house clean. Anybody out there got some good ideas to make housekeeping more palatable?

In my madness yesterday I decided to run/walk home from work….a 16 K commitment…from my workplace in the City to my home in the Village. (JD dropped me off at my work on the way to his work so I could get a few things done before the week officially started.)

Not only that, I decided to stop at the grocery store about a third of the way into my run to pick up a package of turkey Italian sausage to add to the Tuscan White Bean soup I had simmering away in the crock pot at home. Oh yeah, and I also picked up a Nivea for Men chapstick for my beloved, who is complaining of dry lips (what with all of his outdoorsy apprentice golf-pro-ing duties and all).

So picture this – a chunky, middle-aged woman jogging along the side of the country road in the blazing heat and sun, clutching her eco-friendly shopping bag (green in principle but black in reality). She is running too fast because she wants to get her raw meat home before it spoils…yeah, and did I mention this woman went to university and majored in MICROBIOLOGY, especially that of FOOD. Brilliant idea, that.

Anywho…..

She crosses the S River (the one that runs into the Village) at about the 8K mark (thank you, Garmin) and spies a sign that reads “S River Trail”. Looks lovely, shady, cool, inviting. She goes for it! Leaves the dusty country road and decides to follow the river home to the Village, on a trail she’s heard of but never been on before. Not exactly dressed for the trail – shorts and a t-shirt, but at least she’s got her newish Asics trail runners on.

At first it was great. Our gal is loving this – the trail is indeed beautiful and cool, though she can tell it is barely used. Many branches and even whole trees lie across the narrow trail and the foliage is pretty dense. So she can’t run at all – too dangerous – but she walks along quite briskly and is delighted with herself for taking this route, away from the hot asphalt and the speeding SUVs. She spies a great blue heron fishing in the river, as well as another dove-grey waterbird she has never seen before. Where is her camera when she needs it?!?!

At some points the trail is almost completely overgrown and our heroine is scanning the trees for blazes, feeling very adventurous indeed. She notices that she is really quite alone out here in the “wilds” between the City and the Village and wonders if there are any “wild things” about that might be attracted to her little package of raw meat. She remembers reading in the newspapers of a black bear sighting in the county a couple of years ago. She decides, if challenged by anything, she will throw the sausages in its general direction (after retrieving the brand new chapstick from the bag first of course) and run like hell. Yeah, that would be the plan. She continues on, still loving the trail and ruing her lack of camera.

She passes through some open areas where the weeds are quite high. She finds out that some of the weeds she has passed through (which looked naggingly familiar) are indeed, stinging nettle. She feels a little like Indiana Jones when she says to herself “Stinging Nettle. Why does it always have to be stinging nettle?!”

Her legs are getting scratched up, and the stinging nettle…er…stings, but that’s OK. She’s having the time of her life and wonders why she doesn’t get out like this more often. She passes a large marsh, thick with bull rushes taller than herself and majestic skeletons of dead trees rising above them. Who knew all this beauty was right in her own backyard?

Then she loses the trail in a damp meadow and decides to break her own trail through the waist high grasses over to a patch of forest, away from the river. Woohoo! She is only a few feet into the woods when she catches sight of a reddish-orange blaze. Back on the trail! There is a beautiful little brook babbling away in these woods and someone has created a makeshift bridge across it. More blazes – fantastic. This part of the trail is like something out of C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew. Our heroine thinks of the Wood between Worlds, where the toffee tree grew from a candy that fell out of someone’s pocket. She thinks, just for a moment, about dropping a Werther’s Original from her waist pack into the dark soil of the woods.

And that’s when things get yucky. It gets muddier and muddier and finally our gal loses a shoe to the black stuff. OK – fun’s over. Time to get the heck out of Dodge. She wrestles her beloved trail runner out of the sucking mud, slaps it back onto her now soaking foot (oh, her brand new running socks – ruined!!!!) and sees what looks to be a field or clearing up a slight hill. She carefully makes her way up to what she hopes is drier soil. But not carefully enough, as her other shoe slides toe-first and tongue-deep into the black stinking goo just as she is steps away from what she can now see as a soybean field. Just peachy!

She makes it onto the tractor trail of the soy field and realizes she is near the Townline Road that is the outer boundary of the Village. And begins following this trail along the edge of the field, stopping just once, to try a soybean, fresh from the pod. Hmmm…not bad.

More beauty – great clumps of Batchelor’s Buttons, snapdragons, goldenrod. The low brush she is walking through is doing a commendable job of scraping the mud off of the shoes. Life is looking good again. She emerges from the field onto someone’s driveway. Some people are partying in the back of a dilapidated house which is melded onto a barn. The home/barn owner, half in the bag, comes out to see the wild, scratched, mud and seed covered being clutching a little black shopping bag who has emerged from the field. “He made you walk, did he?” he offers in greeting. “Just walking home from the City by way of the S River Trail” she replies. This startles the party animal, who shouts back to his friends “She says she WALKED from the City!!!” A few more pleasantries are exchanged, and our fearless female gets onto the road and walks/runs the last few K back home.

Three and a half hours after she started her adventure, she leaves her disgusting shoes and socks outside her front door, puts the still OK (she hopes) sausage into the crockpot with the bubbling soup and heads into the bathroom for a much needed shower.

What ever shall I do to top this next week?

OK, so I am tired of coming home in the evening, staring at the cupboards and the fridge and going “Now what?”

Menu planning is obviously the answer.

I love to cook. Like most things I love to do, I seldom allow myself the time to do it. (Gardening, running, painting, and knitting are just a few of the things that come immediately to mind here). But I am trying to change all that. And trying to eat healthier too, so menu planning is just the ticket.

In planning to plan (how’s that for dragging it out?), I am trying to come up with themes for each night of the week, to inspire and guide me in what recipes I want to make/try for the first time.

So far, this is what I’ve got:

Meatless Mondays
? Tuesdays
? Wednesdays
? Thursdays
Fishy Fridays
Souper Saturdays
Slow-Cooker Sundays

The middle of the week has got me baffled so far.
‘Talian Tuesdays?
One-pot Wednesdays? (Hey, I kinda like this one.)
Thai Thursdays?

I’ll keep thinking.

Tomorrow JD and I are starting the 4 Day Anti-Bloat Jumpstart to the Flat Belly Diet. I bought the book (and the cookbook – amazing recipes!) after reviewing a copy at the Village Library. And I am a wee bit scared and exhilarated at the same time. The first 4 days are very restrictive, which I am not good at….but it’s only 4 days.

JD has had a fabulous spring and summer, weight-wise. He’s lost about 35 pounds. But still has a bit of a belly, hence his interest in the Flat Belly plan, besides being supportive of me. He is looking lean and yummy!

Me, well…I’ve stayed up and down within the same 5 or so pounds. I am eating healthier, but obviously still too much and I need to be more active. Since JD switched careers (desk job to apprentice golf pro), his activity levels have increased significantly and the weight has just melted off, even though he eats 4 times what I do. Men!

I got interested in the Flat Belly Diet because the food is stuff I love already, it looks easy, and it’s heart-healthy – always a priority with my genetics. Lots of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, lean meats and the MUFAs: olives, nuts, seeds, avocados, chocolate…to name a few.

I never had a real belly problem until a few years ago, pregnancies excepted. I used to put on weight on my hips and legs and butt mostly, but now I am getting thick in the middle, which I know is the most dangerous place, health-wise, to put on fat.