Overbooked and Underpaid: Notes from a Yes-aholic

When Good Warmers Go Bad

 

No, I am not inviting all of you into my bed. If you look closely at the above photo of my sheets you will see little brown spots. These are not bed bugs.

They are Lentils.

And not just any lentils. They are toasted lentils.

How did a bunch of toasted lentils get onto my sheets? They arrived when my homemade "bed buddy" exploded.

Minds out of the gutter, please. A "bed buddy" is a microwavable hot pack. And I have a collection of them that have saved my aching back and neck on more than one occasion. (You can read how to make your own here.)

I guess it's time to trot out the sewing machine and make some new ones.....

Evolving Into Exercise

 

I am a sloth.

My favorite piece of furniture is a chaise lounge. Since I don't have one of those, my favorite piece of furniture is my bed and my favorite accessories are a down comforter and 3 good pillows to lean against.

What I'm trying to say is - exercise is not my first choice when it comes to how I like to spend my time.

Despite that, I have spent quite a bit of my life exercising. My first choice of a career was dance. To that end, I spent over twelve years training intensely in ballet and modern dance only to have the whole thing derailed by a failure to grow to a stature taller than 5 foot 2. Well, that and the arrival of the D cup bust. George Balanchine material I wasn't.

I also did 5 years of gymnastics. Career derailed by injuries and that boob thing again. Plus - I really wasn't all that good.

But I absolutely hated every sport I ever played and every gym class I was ever in. I remember first grade gym class most particularly. Gym for young girls of that time included wearing something called "bloomers". As entertaining as that sounds, it's not nearly so entertaining as it looked. They were basically puffy dark blue shorts and all the girls were required to wear them. The boys got to wear their regular clothes. My feministic streak may very well have begun during this class. 

The other horrible thing about first grade gym was the gym teacher's love of the recording "Chicken Fat". We did exercises to this damn song almost every class.

 

 

 

Is it any wonder I spent most of the rest of my life evading exercise? Especially the boring kind designed only to get you fit?

But after I left dance and had three kids and watched my body slide completely down hill, I finally had to make peace with the idea that I was going to have to start working out on some level. 

To that end, I began walking outdoors three days a week with a walking buddy about 16 years ago. It was the height of Oprah's "Walk Yourself Thin" program. I enjoy these walks because I have a great walking buddy and we get some terrific chatting in. But I have to confess that, any day she doesn't show up, I just go back into my house and do something else, grateful for the extra time in my day. (Which may have something to do with never getting to the "thin" part.)

And I did spend a year working out with a personal trainer in an attempt to rehab a shoulder injury and get some better tone to my body overall. That wasn't too bad because, again, I got to chat with the trainer and take my mind of how boring the actual exercises were.

But now I have found my exercise niche. 

Over a year and a half ago I started walking an indoor track like the one pictured above. (Those of you familiar with my daily bookings know that this is supposed to be part of my weekday routine.)

But I didn't really approach it with any more discipline than any of the other things I tried and I can't say I paid particular attention to how walking the track - or not walking it - impacted the rest of my life.

Then, this fall, I stopped walking the track and in January started up again. After two weeks of putting it back into my routine I noticed something I hadn't noticed before.

I could write again.

Lightbulb.

For me, there is a direct link between a certain kind of exercise and creativity. I say a certain kind of exercise because part of the equation is the time to myself that I get when I'm walking the track vs walking with my walking buddy. 

The meditative quality of walking in circles, the time away from other people, the internet, and all the other things that steal my focus, and the uptempo music I choose to walk to, all contribute to making me more creative. I almost always leave a track session with several ideas for columns.

Since I'm a reward junkie, heightened creativity is just the sort of carrot I need dangling in front of me to make exercising worthwhile.

So I guess I'm evolving myself to a point where I can embrace exercise rather than despising it.

Just don't make me listen to that Chicken Fat song.

My Hot Flash Solution - The Pashmina

Hot flashes suck.

They just do.

And I know there are all these things I'm supposed to be able to do or special foods to eat or vitamins to take to make them suck less.

I don't make lifestyle changes off anecdotal evidence. I'm a research girl.

But research takes time - of which I haven't got any.

So my current solution (during the daytime, anyway - don't get me started on trying to sleep when you're burning up) is the Pashmina shawl.

It's lightweight and compact, I can wear it as a shawl or a scarf or a belt, or simply throw it into my purse when I don't need it. This allows me to wear a nice lightweight turtle neck (I'm in snow country - I'm not going to be able to get away with tank tops in December) with the shawl over it when I'm cold and then I can just toss that shawl off when the flash starts.

It's not perfect, but it beats risking cancer taking HRT.

Bed Warmers

I have a bad back.

I also have a bad neck, bad knees, bad shoulders and I get killer headaches. Not exactly migraines, but close.

And the remedy I use over all others for all these aches and pains is a homemade hot pack. You can buy them at pharmacies - they're called all sorts of things, including Bed Buddies. But you can also make your own. It's cheaper and it's easy. And it's a great way to reuse old towels or washcloths and that unmatched sock.

I've used both rice and lentils and have had much better success with lentils.

For a long warmer that you can place around your neck, use a good sized tube sock and 2-3 pounds of uncooked lentils. Simply pour the lentils into the sock and sew up the end (make sure there are no holes in the sock!). Or, if you have no sewing materials handy, just put a knot in the end of the sock.

For a bigger warmer that lies flat enough to put behind your back, take an old dish towel or hand towel, fold it in half and sew around the sides. Leave an opening about 4 inches long into which you can pour the lentils and then fill the cavity with 4-6 pounds of lentils, depending on the size of the towel.

To use, place the lentil stuffed bag or sock into the microwave for a couple of minutes. Microwave power varies greatly from one oven to the next so you will need to experiment with the precise time to heat your bed warmer properly. I would start with 2 minutes, take the bag/sock out and shake the lentils around, and then continue heating in 1-2 minute intervals until you have the desired warmth.

Caution! Never leave one of these unattended in the microwave for more than 4 minutes of heating time, as overheating can scorch the lentils and the fabric. And always use cotton towels - not polyester.

We once stayed in a wonderful rustic stone cabin with no heat source but a fireplace. But, there was a small kitchen with a microwave, so I ran out to the local store and bought lentils. I then used some of the kids extra socks to make each person a bed warmer. The temperature in the cabin was around 40 degrees at night but, between the fireplace, the quilts, and the bed warmers, we were toasty!

No One Warned Me

I have never worried too much about getting older. I have always told myself this is because I have a healthy and realistic attitude about life and my body. In the recent words of rocker Tom Petty, who is approaching his 60th birthday, “ If you’re not aging, you’re dead.”. Pretty succinct.

It may also have something to do with having completely abused my body in my youth with an overactive regimen of ballet and gynmnastics, leaving me with the aches and pains of a sixty year old at twenty. My body has felt old for a long time.

And I seem to have some genetic protection from varicose veins and cellulite (thank you Grandmother Frye!) and even a little edge in the wrinkle and gray hair department. So I have never understood the fascination with anti-aging cosmetics, wrinkle creams, botox injections, face lifts, tummy tucks, you name it, that modern women spend thousands - and I mean thousands - of dollars on every year. I mean, come on - you’re getting older, stuff changes. In the words of my old gymnastics coach, “Suck it up!”.

Then, sometime last year I think it was, I looked in the

mirror. I mean really looked in the mirror. 

 Let me backtrack. When I graduated from college my father came for the ceremony and I had a moment. He was sitting in my apartment waiting for me to get ready to go and I looked at him and realized he had gray hair. Now, he had probably had gradually graying hair for at least five or six years, but now it was completely gray. And I realized I had been doing a funny sort of superimposition of black hair on his head every time I looked at him. I hadn’t really seen him as he was in a long time. 

 And that is what happened that day when I looked in the mirror. I suddenly saw this middle aged creature looking back out at me. Complete with neck jowels. And thinning hair with a little bit of gray creeping in. And a thickening waist. And forehead wrinkles. And neckline wrinkles. And knee wrinkles.

It was the last one that got me. In my wildest dreams, it never occured to me that my knees were going to wrinkle.

And here I must confess to all that my greatest vanity in life has been my legs. Between good genetics (Grandmother Frye again) and twelve years of very serious dance training, I have been blessed for the lion’s share of my adult life with good legs. And I have taken pride in these legs and delighted in the wearing of short skirts.

A few years back I saw a show - it may have been “What Not To Wear”, I’m not sure - where they told this 45 year old woman that she was too old to wear short skirts. That she needed to now wear skirts that had a hem just above the knee. I thought they were being needlessly and ruthlessly ageist. That they were telling her not to wear short skirts simply because she had hit a certain number of years and now needed to telegraph her age to the world through her choice of skirt. 

 Oh no, that was not the reason. 

The true reason was that 45 year old women have knee wrinkles. And I don’t mean a little indentation here and there. I mean knees that look as though they belong on a pachyderm. (I won’t carry that comparison any farther, ladies). 

Knees that wink at you if you move them just right. 

Knees that proclaim to the world “I am middle aged!”. “And I’m not getting any younger, thank you very much!”

So began my search. The search for the perfect wrinkle cream. The cream that would wipe away those knee wrinkles for good. Well, another five years at least. And what I found was a dizzying array of fillers, smoothers, toners, plumpers, and lifters and about a hundred and twenty-five thousand magazine and blog articles about age defying creams.

Well now, there is a reason that all those beautiful magazine ads for wrinkle free skin are of faces. Because the sad fact of the matter is, ain’t no wrinkle like a knee wrinkle. Those crevices are here to stay.

So I guess I will have to take the advice of my old coach

and just suck it up.

Unless you’ve heard of a good cream for knee wrinkles.

Call me.