91.9

That’s my weight, today[2nd Feb].

That’s my stumbling block.

Three times, I’ve got down to 91.9 only to yo-yo back up to the next kilo bracket. since I spend a week working off roughly a kilo, I watch those decimals like a hawk. Getting down into the next “kilo zone” is fast becoming an obsession.

Better make certain it’s not a dangerous one, then.

And in the Antiprogress side of things: My bone bruises, especially the one in my left heel, have decided to make walking hell. I limp everywhere at half or less of my normal speed.

Plus: I’m not wandering about and grabbing snacks.

Minus: I’m not exactly exercising, either.

Well, I don’t need to walk to exercise. I can still pedal. And I will.

As soon as I gather the courage to walk as far as the exercise bike.

The Drops

MeMum used to call it “dropsy” when she was feeling whimsical. On other days, it was the “sadim"s [Midas spelled backwards]. Those days when everything around you seems destined to ricochet off the floor.

I prefer to call it "the drops” so people don’t look at me funny.

Mayhem has it this morning. He’s spilled seven different things towards the floor - including my morning beverage and the cat’s water - and counting.

My best advice to him, and anyone who’s having a clumsy day, is this: Slow down, take a breath, and take it carefully.

Once you start a clumsy streak, it’s easy to get agitated or angry and make even more mistakes. Which, as you might guess, starts a self-defeating cycle involving a lot of interesting new swears.

But of course, nobody ever listens to me.

I’m just a mum.

The hazards of dog-walking

Before the weeks of deluge, I alternated blocks to walk the hound around. Let’s call them Clockwise and Anticlockwise.

And a couple of times, I even managed to do both.

That was before we evicted the Carpet From Hell [it wasn’t paying rent], the subsequent stint of bad asthma, and a rainstorm just short of another effing flood.

Now I’m back to one block until I’m absolutely, positively certain that my health is up to a double circuit.

Problem is, the plovers have moved into Clockwise Path.

Plovers are one of the few ground-nesting species to survive the introduction of the White Man [and his associated pe(s)ts]. They did this through sheer bloody-mindedness and an aggressively belligerent attitude against anything else that moves. Oh, and nasty little spurs on their wings that can split your skin wide open.

They’re also one of the few native species with sharp bits that are not also venomous. Count your small blessings while you may.

Silly me, I decided to take Clockwise Path to see what’s been going on since the last time the sun deigned to shine.

I had to jog the dog past the plovers and pray neither of us got struck. Even though my pink canvas hat is nice and thick, I doubt it’s thick enough to double as a plover-proof helmet.

Good news: we made it. Yay.

Bad news: Clockwise path is now officially closed to me until such time as the plovers move out. This can take some significant time.

We once had a family of plovers nesting in our backyard for a friggin’ year. A year! Sure, they raised successive generations of adorable fluffy chicks [and the babies are adorable, just steer clear of the overprotective parents] but we had a large circle of yard we couldn’t mow.

Medaeval maps have “here there be dragons” on them to denote dangerous or unknown territory. Australia has “here there be plovers”.

If I do get up to a double circuit during nesting season, I shall go twice around Anticlockwise Path. And if the plovers move in there… four times around the inside of our fence.

Never argue with a plover. They always win.

Progress and AntiProgress

Sir Terry Pratchett argued convincingly that everything must have it’s opposite. Not just the light-dark opposite, but the opposite that goes through the conventional, traditional opposite and out the other side.

We have progress. What I’m having is a kind of anti-progress that has gone through retention and out the other side.

I am getting fit enough to take the dog around two blocks -yay- BUT, on the anti-progress side, I’ve been struck from asthma as a direct result of Mayhem’s Carpet From Hell [coming to a cinema near you!] and literally can’t walk more than a block without wheezing and coming over all blue.

Progress: we got all the filth out of Mayhem’s room. Something of a Herculean task, I can tell you. The Augean Stables were easier.
Antiprogress: Since the Carpet From Hell™ needed to be got rid of, Hubby and Brother-in-Law [aka Normally Shiftless] thought this was a brilliant excuse to renovate. Now I have furniture blocking further progress in getting the house clean and thanks to Mayhem’s hazmat situation I now have two cubic metres of laundry to tackle.

Progress: I’m getting more than five steps in a row before having to stop and re-introduce the hound to the concept of “heel”.
Antiprogress: He gets the idea that when I stop, he should be next to/behind me, but hasn’t connected the command with the action. Thus my entire walk is me saying “heel” practically nonstop for fifteen or so minutes. The word is losing all meaning.

Progress: Chaos is starting to help with small household cleaning tasks.
Antiprogress: it mostly consists of grabbing the nearest sponge or towel and wiping five square centimetres of countertop. Adorable, but useless.

Progress: I think I’m getting the household to start picking up after themselves
Antiprogress: There’s still vast swathes of “That’s not mine” when I’m after whoever left a mess. One day, I shall get them to clean the mess they see.

Of course, one day, the sun will grow cold and die… but I hope I can achieve that goal before then.

It’s a constant, uphill slog. I’m tired of it.

I can hold out the hope that I’ll get there, and achieve a lovely house and keep it that way… But I was nearly there… and now my house is once more crammed with stuff I have to get out of the way.

Some times, it makes me want to cry.

Crying never got anything done. Guess I have to get up and just do it.

Because no-one else will.

Quick diets and why they fail

I’m more aware of them, now that I’m trying to lose weight. The advertisements. The shill proclaiming their new product and ONLY their product will help you reach your target weight and stay there.

It’s all bullshit.

Especially the ones where they claim you -yes, you!- can drop an extravagant number of pounds/kilos in an amazingly short time.

What they never tell you is that you -yes, you!- inevitably yo-yo back up again when it’s over. Hell, that’s how they make their money.

Many “fast” diets are simple fasting. Or losing ‘water weight’ aka 'dehydration’ in the medical circles. And what happens is simple to predict - your body makes you, the dieter, obsess about all the many, varied no-no’s until you snap and break down in a frenzy of chocolate and fizzy drinks.

And, of course, you pack on more weight because your body has entered 'famine mode’ and wants to store fat for another such crisis.

A wise writer [Kaz Cooke] once said, “Your body is the ultimate smarty-pants”.

Then there are the “one food” diets. The rice diet. The leek diet. The grapefruit diet. The shittons of chocolate diet. Okay, I made that last one up, but you get the idea. After a few days of the prescribed 'one food’, you start to go completely bonkers. Obsessed with everything else not on your personal menu. Eventually, the dieter binges on everything else but the 'one food’ and rises further above their goal weight.

Then there are what I like to refer to as “math diets”. You can eat the stuff you like, but it’s worth score points. Calories, carb-equivalents… you name it. The dieter in this becomes compelled to evaluate food as a number. Now I admit, some of these math diets work. Or seem to. I keep getting the mental image of someone in a grocer’s with a calculator, not working out what their total is going to be, but working out whether or not they should buy a foodstuff based on its point value.

Lots of math diets are bad - simply because the math is off. If the body fails to get a certain amount of fat intake, it once again goes into starvation mode and prepares to balloon when it encounters what it considers to be the good stuff.

One great scam in the weight loss industry is the pre-prepared-meal diet. The dieter pays a great fee for meals made the way the industry mogul decrees. And they have to keep paying or the meals will stop. This teaches nothing - especially in the cases where they make the dieter’s favourite foods for them.

When the diet goal is accomplished and the dieter steps away from the protective embrace of portioned, balanced meals that look and taste exactly like the real thing… the dieter gains weight with the same bad habits the programme did not curb.

There’s a reason why just about every diet book contains a food pyramid diagram. What follows after that is generally attempting to lead the dieter away from sticking with just the pyramid.

But following the pyramid is not enough. You need to eat less. And in order to feel satisfied with less, you need to eat slowly.

The slower you eat, the fuller you feel. Simple.

And the better you eat, the healthier you get. Also simple.

Getting in to good habits, like regular exercise, are also a great help.

But there is a point in a diet where the weight loss just slows down for no apparent reason. Most will convince you this is some kind of unnatural and sell you more products.

All slower weight loss means is that the body has noticed you losing weight.

Keep the three meals a day. Choose healthier snacks when the need arises to snack. Keep the faith.

If you are still losing weight, then that’s the good thing [I am, of course, assuming anyone reading this is above a healthy weight]. Not the speed.

Permanent weight loss takes time.

Three meals a day - eaten slowly, of course - can help fuel the body through the exercise regime of your choice. They also help prevent the body from entering panic mode and wanting to keep or whack on the weight.

A little fat is not a bad thing.

A lot of fat is.

It’s that simple.

Which is why they never tell you that.

I am Desperately Out of Shape

So I thought this morning, “I have to go to the chemists’. I’ll kill two birds with one stone and take the dog for a walk at the same time.”

Bad. Idea.

1) It was stinking hot
2) We both needed a drink by the halfway point
3) I forgot to bring water and drink containers
4) The best I could do for a hitching post was snagging the leash around an awning upright
5) Despite the use of a check chain, the dog still tugs my arm off.

I’m out of breath, lathered in sweat, struggling for breath [Ironically, I was heading up to the chemists’ to get asthma meds]. The dog is panting by his water dish in the shade. I don’t know which one of us is more knackered.

I need to get fitter.

And the best way for a sedentary soul like myself to get fit?

Taking the dog for a fargnaxing walk.

Every morning.

At least in the morning it’ll be relatively cool. And I can piss off the neighbour who hates barking dogs by setting off every dog in the neighbourhood. And being all innocent, “I just got back from taking him for a walk. He’s been a little angel. It’s the other dogs you need to be mad at,” if he rings up.

Heheh. Revenge will be sweet. And a bit petty.

If I alternate blocks I go around, maybe he won’t wake up for a while that it’s me.

So I’m joining the latest fitness campaign and swapping Minecraft in the morning to taking the dog for a walk.

Then flopping down ‘till I get my breath back and playing Minecraft :)

The Alien in the Playground

You can spot her from a mile away. The one kid playing alone. Lost in her own little world. She clearly wears a mixture of hand-me-downs and homemade clothing when all the other children are wearing clothes, relatively new, from the shops.

Some other children are approaching her. Even from this distant vantage point, you can tell their intent is not friendly. They are all bigger than her. Together, they could beat her into a pulp, but violence is not their pastime right now.

“Hey Weller!” The ringleader startles the girl out of her private reality. “You’re weird.”

This is clearly meant to make her cry. It doesn’t.

She folds her arms like the woman in I Dream of Genie. “Ah, Earthling, you’ve discovered my secret.” Two index fingers quickly become antennae. “Beep beep.” Now one hand becomes a telephone. “Beam me up, Scotty, I’m on the lam!” And now the little girl is laughing at them.

The year was 1979. That little alien was me. And that was the only time I could publicly laugh at the bullies.

They worked out what to do about it, later. They passed close by and punched me in the gut so quickly that if the imaginary observer blinked, they would miss it. They took out their anger on me because I was a natural target.

Skinny, undersized, bespectacled. Clearly from a lower income background than them. And, as they said, weird.

I was proud to be weird. I revelled in my freakiness. I didn’t think it made me special, or above them, per se. I just couldn’t understand why they would want to miss out.

Being a weirdo was fun - well, except for being bullied every day. It seemed to me that the normals [or, as I later learned to call them, mundanes] were missing out on a wider range of experience because those experiences were deemed “weird”.

Only weirdoes enjoyed Doctor Who. Because Science Fiction of any kidney was “too weird” for the mundanes. Only freaks watched Star Trek. But it was okay to like Superman because he was mainstream.

I knew much more than my contemporaries because I was interested in things. I voluntarily watched documentaries. I stayed up late to watch Star Trek [This being some years before VCR’s became affordable to my blue-collar household] and spent my free time in the library reading books. Big, thick books. With hardly any pictures.

It was their own fault, that last bit. If they hadn’t devoted so much effort to singling me out for bullying, I would never have retreated to the library in the first place. The library was a small area where rowdy behaviour was frowned upon and there was at least one teacher close to hand at all times. The library was my safe place. I could hole up in a corner and read the words that sent me to another reality.

In high school, I was worse. Skinny, bespectacled and weedy. The kid who always put their hand up to answer a question and who could talk to the teachers on their own level. I was the one girl in the school who passed out of it still a virgin. Still unattached to any males there.

To me, it hardly took any effort at all to avoid the boys my age. They were all… dumb.

Any attempt at conversation with them inevitably lead to the thing seemingly on everyone’s mind but mine: sex. Everyone in grade ten [that’s 14-15 year-olds, folks] or older had to lose their virginity or be ostracised. Having sex meant turning into an adult.

That’s what they told me.

That’s what I refused to believe.

I did not feel ashamed. Nor did I become embarrassed when they tried to ridicule me for being a virgin. I had made a choice and my choice was different to theirs.

“But everyone’s doing it,” they would cry.

“Not me,” said I.

“WHYYYYYYYY?” was the inevitable wail. “Don’t you want to be an adult?”

I tried to explain, when it began, that adulthood was more than connecting genetalia. By the third time, I gave up. They clearly weren’t listening.

The mundanes chanted, “Get a life,” like the freaks chanted “One of us” in the movie of the same name. What they meant was, “Do everything we do and stop being weird.” They wanted me to light up a smoke, chug a beer, and open my legs to the first numb-knuckle with an erection.

I knew, even then, that it would not work out. They would still deride me. “Sell-out”, “wimp”, “slut” and “whore” were just a few things they would call me.

A group of boys approached me once, on the way to a class. There were at least five of them. The spokesgrunt said, “Hey Weller. We heard you do it.” By “do it”, they mean “have sex”.

I started to edge around the cluster.

“Do you do it?”

My God, what irresistible charm. I should have dropped my knickers, spread my legs and screamed, “Take me! Take me now!” At least, that’s what they seemingly believed.

No.

I laughed. Loud and long, and continued on my way to the classroom. I was completely unafraid because this group had chosen to proposition me not five meters from a populated staff room. True adults were within and no doubt listening to the exchange.

Less than a week later, I was a “frigid whore” according to the sex-obsessed masses. I rolled my eyes at the oxymoron and continued on my way.

Less than a month later, I had someone ask me to my face if I was a lesbian.

I ignored them. I retreated to safe places and put myself in a survival mindset. If I could make it to University, they would not follow me.

I did. None of the mundanes were there. Especially not in my study zone, which was computers and technology. The geeks and weirdoes were here. At last, I belonged somewhere.

It’s hard to shake the habits of school and high-school. I had learned to become invisible and laugh at myself because everyone else did. At least that way, I said the joke first.

And when I found someone who thought I was worth something, who loved me for everything I am, who saw me even when I inadvertently blended into the wallpaper… it broke me.

I had a mental breakdown at age nineteen because someone thought I was worth love.

The mundanes, for all my appearances of ignoring them, had got to me. Tell someone they’re ugly for long enough and they’ll believe it. Tell someone they’re worthless… and they stop trying to fight.

My thinking broke into two parts. The dark side, that had learned to hate me and cling to the bad things, and the positive side. The positive side repeatedly said, “Look. There’s someone who loves you.” Or, “Hey, something shiny.” Life is a constant battle between the “up” part of my thinking and the perpetual downer who lives in the back of my mind.

I’m not manic-depressive. Not enough to medicate, anyway. I’m not classically OCD. I may be somewhere on the ASD rainbow, because I can recognise myself in the diagnostic checklist.

What I am, is weird.

I enjoy it.

Try it sometime.

It’s fun.