WIP It Into Shape Wednesday

Knitting WIP
This week's knitting WIP is the pair of socks I cast on New Year's Day.  As I mentioned, one of my goals for 2016 is to knit at least 12 pairs of socks.  I don't know that I will do exactly 1 pair per month, but I know that if I finish at least 1 pair each month, I'll hit my goal, so these are January's pair in progress.

I'm just doing a plain "vanilla" sock, toe up.  The yarn is Knit Picks Felici in Rainbow. I will do the Fish Lips Kiss Heel when I get to that point.  I prefer to knit my socks two at a time on two circulars if possible.  There are occasions when doing certain types of patterned socks where that's not possible, but if I can, I do.

These are being housed in my Dr. Who Tardis bag from Erin Lane Bags.  This is a small sock bag that has a divider inside to keep two skeins of yarn separate.  I love the fabric and I like the interior design.  I'm not a big fan of the way she does her drawstring on this bag.  The bag is very well constructed, it's just a personal preference thing.  I prefer one drawstring coming out one side with a tension clip or something.  This one has two ribbons running through and you pull from both sides. This is the first of her bags I've bought, so it may just be this particular style of bag.  I bought this one at SAFF, so I'll have to look at her others next time.

I'm using a Poke Me Not from JanBSmiley to not only keep my stitches from sliding off the needles, but to keep the small pointy needles from poking through the bag.  I have about 7 of these things because I use them on just about every project.  Highly recommend!


WIP Me Into Shape
I've decided to add weightloss progress to Wednesday's as well.  After all, I'm a WIP too.  I don't really want this to become a weightloss blog, but I don't want to ignore that part of my daily life either, so I will attempt to strike a balance between sharing some of my efforts to be healthier with you without going overboard.

I may do a longer post at some point with a little more of my lifetime battle with my weight, but suffice it to say it's not the first time I've made an effort to lose weight.  I've tried tons of times, and even been successful a couple of those.  I can lose weight when I set my mind to it.  I just need to make it stick at some point.  But for now, I need to focus on losing.  Hopefully by the time I get to where I want to be this time, I'll figure out how to maintain it too.

I'm a lifetime Weight Watchers member, but I'm way over goal.  I've tried to get back into WW the past few months, but it just wasn't clicking and with the changes to the new program, it's not going to work for me.  So I'm doing this without an official program of any kind.  I need to make lifestyle changes that are just that, my lifestyle, and not work this program or that, or this eating plan or that.  So my current tools are my Fitbit Surge and the Fitbit App to track my food intake.  I'm trying a couple of different online groups to find the right fit for support, but mainly I'm trying to eat healthier and move more.

I "officially" started last Tuesday, January 5th and I will record my weight every Tuesday morning.  Doesn't mean I won't weigh myself other days, but the weight I will record for tracking purposes will be whatever I weigh Tuesday morning before I get into the shower.  So yesterday was my first weigh-in day and I did really well this week.  Of course, the first week, when you go from eating a bunch of junk to actually eating somewhat healthy is always good, but it's always a nice boost as well.

I have a lot of weight to lose, and I haven't decided yet whether I want to share actual numbers here or not.  I have a feeling that if I'm actually successful in making some progress this time I will get more comfortable with sharing the details, but until then, I'm sorry if I keep that part vague.  I will say that my first goal is to lose 5# by February 2, and in one week I'm well on my way to that goal.

Happy Hump Day!

New Year, New Approach

This little guy has nothing to do with the New Year, but he makes me smile.

I don't know what it is about the New Year that makes me feel like I have a clean slate.  It's not like there's any real change that occurs between December 31 and January 1, but it just feels like a fresh start.

I long ago gave up the idea of resolutions in favor of goals.  Resolutions always result in a feeling of guilt when they're broken, as almost always happens.  Goals feel more ongoing somehow, like something I'm striving towards rather than a set guideline or rule.  It's all terminology and semantics I suppose, but the word goal feels less strict to me.

This year I'm modifying my approach a little more and I'm stating several broad goals for the year, but I'm setting much smaller short term goals in each area.  I'm hopeful that this will keep me a little more focused in the short term.  Sort of a take it a day at a time approach, but on a monthly basis (or in some cases even weekly).  So rather than saying I'll post here 10 times per month, I'm saying my goal is to write blog posts more often, and my specific goal for January is at least 10 posts after this one.

I'm keeping most of the specifics to myself for the moment, although I may talk about some of them in the future, but here are my broad goals for the year.

• Health - Eat healthier, exercise more, lose weight
• Writing - Write more in all aspects, including blog posts, personal journal, short stories, novel
• Fiber Arts - Use my existing yarn/fiber stash and limit additions to stash, spin more

Bicycling in Bed

I have long had insomnia.  I never have a problem sleeping once I get to sleep, trust me, I'm a champion sleeper, but I can lay awake for hours waiting for sleep to come.

One of the culprits is my brain.  It just won't shut up.  It seems that when I lay down to sleep at night and I'm no longer doing anything is when my brain decides it needs to go through tomorrow's to do list, compose bill drafts, blog entries, e-mails, and anything else it can come up with.  It's not unusual for me to look at the clock, realize that I've been in bed awake for 2 hours and also be able to trace back every single thing I've thought about since I turned out the light.   Of course, that doesn't mean I'll remember any of it the next day when I should be thinking about it all. Case in point.

The other villain that contributes to my sleeplessness is Restless Leg Syndrome, or what Rob calls my bicycling in bed.  If you're part of the 10% or so of the population that suffers from this, you'll know what I'm talking about.  Trying to lay still and ignore the desire to move my feet and legs is useless.  My RLS occurs at other times as well.  It's not unusual for me to be sitting in a meeting and find myself bouncing one or both legs up and down.  But when I lay down at night to go to sleep is definitely the worst time, and unfortunately there is no logic to when it will occur, how long it will last, or how severe it will be.  Many times it's easier to just get up out of bed and go do something else for 30 minutes or so and then try again to sleep.

It appears to be a genetic thing.  I know that my sister has it as bad as I do, both in bed and out, and my brother also has it, at least when trying to lie down in bed.  Oddly, I've never thought to ask my parents if either of them have it, but I noticed my oldest niece exhibiting symptoms of it at her 1st communion a couple of weeks ago as well.

Most nights I don't even try to go to bed before midnight because I know I won't sleep anyway.  Sometimes that's not enough and I lie awake until the wee hours of the morning.  I have a sleeping pill prescription, but I don't like to take it until have had several nights in a row of little to no sleep because it makes it even harder to get out of bed in the morning.  I'm not a morning person to begin with, so I don't need anything else giving me an excuse to hit the snooze.

For the most part, I've come to accept that RLS, and insomnia in general, is just something I have to live with, but it would still be nice to be able to lie down in bed without feeling like Jiminy Cricket.

Goal Setting for 2012

I was looking back at my goals for 2011 (some of which I posted here and some of which I didn't) and thinking that I didn't really achieve all that much.  But then I realized that I actually accomplished a really big goal in 2011.  It's one of those goals that I sort of half-heartedly set every year, and yet never accomplish, so I didn't even mention it here, but I actually did it in 2011.......I quit smoking.  After smoking for almost 27 years, I smoked my last cigarette on June 27, 2011.  So regardless of all the other goals I did not meet last year, that one makes up for it in MY grand scheme of things.

Hoping to do a little better on some of the other ones this year though.  The two general categories remain the same....health/weight loss and writing.

Health/Weight loss

I put health first, because although I do want to lose weight, my first priority is recovering completely from my back surgery.  I'm hoping in the process of focusing on that first that I will lose some weight, and I'm planning to take other steps to help with weight loss as well.  However, I don't expect to complete my weight loss in 2012, but I do hope to make some progress and get myself in a better position physically to do the exercise I know will be necessary. 

Specific goals:

• Do exercises recommended by physical therapist, as often as recommended. (currently daily)
• Walk at least 1 mile either outside or on treadmill at least 2X per week. I hope to increase this over time in both the mileage and number of times per week, but right now 1 mile takes almost 30 minutes and the PT exercises make me really sore, so don't want to overdo to the point I give up and quit.
• Re-evaluate exercise goals monthly and set specific goals to achieve.
• Track food intake.  Note that right now this is not "eat healthier" or anything similar.  I just want to get in the habit of tracking what I eat.  I know that as I make the tracking a habit I will naturally start to eat healthier.

Writing

I just need to make writing regularly a habit.  There were a couple of weeks during the middle of my recovery from surgery, when I was still on pain meds but reducing the amounts, that I journaled in my handwritten journal daily, and sometimes more than once a day.  Maybe it was the pain meds, or maybe it's that I was home alone so much at that point that I didn't have anyone to talk to so I just wrote things out instead, but I'd like to get back to doing my personal journaling on a more regular basis, in addition to posting here more frequently, and I still need to work on some of my story ideas as well.

I think I was a little overly ambitious last year about how much time I would be able to put aside for writing, but maybe not.  I'm currently reading The Productive Writer and I may revise these goals some as I have time to ponder the recommendations in that book and see how they best apply to my real life.

Specific goals:

• Write in handwritten journal at least twice per week.  I should really try to do this daily, but I'm going to start with the 2X per week goal.  
• Post on blog at least twice per week.  Again, would love to do more, but I think the 2X per week is achievable.
• Spend at least 2 hours every month working on fiction.  This includes fleshing out story ideas, reviewing and editing already written material, and doing writing exercises.  I should be able to find at least 1 weekend in every month where I can find 2 hours of quiet to do this, but if I manage it in 15 minute increments throughout the month, that works too.

I'm going to come up with some way to remind myself of these goals on a regular basis, otherwise a week gets away from me too fast.  I will also try to remember to update here every month or so as I reconsider or change specific goals and just to generally report on my progress.

Welcome to 2012

Happy New Year!

Just wanted to post something to say I'm still here.  Started back to work this week.  Who knew sitting in an office chair could lead to so much stiffness?  Doing o.k. as long as I remember to get up and walk around a bit every hour or so.

Haven't had time to really work on my specific goals for the year.  Plan to do that this weekend.  Have my first physical therapy appointment on Friday, which will help me determine my preliminary goals for exercising.  I know that my exercise goals will definitely change as the year progresses and I am able to do more, so it may be that one of my goals is to set new goals every so often, we'll see.

Also thinking about making a list of knitting projects that I've been meaning to get around to, but never seem to do.  The list would serve as more of a reminder than a goal list really, but there are several things I keep saying I'm going to make, like fingerless mitts for myself (I made them for everyone else Christmas 2010) and I want to get to at least some of them this year.

I've added a new post to track my reading for 2012.  You can find the link in the sidebar.

More to come soon!

Plans Go Awry, But You've Got to Have Friends

I know when I posted in August I planned to get back here at that time.  Well, you know.  Life happens.  Work didn't really slow down the way I thought it would and there was this & that, and before I knew it, it was November 8 & I was having back surgery.  Yes, I decided to do the surgery, and I'm glad I did, but the recovery has been long and is still ongoing.  I'm planning another post later about the surgery & recovery in general, and things I've learned along the way.  I will go ahead and tell you know that I have some of the best family and friends in the world.

I also have some of the best coworkers.  One of the things that did not go as planned was the week and a half leading up to my surgery.  I work in Raleigh but Sanford, where I live, is an hour away and a much smaller town, so there are a lot of things that I buy or take care of in Raleigh rather than Sanford.  For example, I buy cat food at PetSmart because I can get the brand we use in 14 lb. bags.  I can get the same cat food in Sanford at the grocery store, but only in 3 lb. bags and at a much steeper price per lb. We have 3 cats, so that's a lot of money saved.  They real point is, I had sort of planned to do all of that running around and getting stuff we would need over the 2 months I was out of work in that week before surgery.  Yeah, that didn't happen.  I did manage to squeeze in the absolutely necessary errands (like cat food) but some others just didn't get done.

I previously mentioned that I am on the redistricting team for my division.  If you live in NC and follow the news at all, you know that there was a problem with the software that translates the maps into bill format was discovered in October. Suddenly, starting a little less than 2 weeks before my surgery, I was working 16 hour days for about 10 days straight.  First we had to manually determine how big the problem was, and then after the software had been reprogrammed we had to manually check to be sure that it was now pulling in the correct information. It was boring monotonous work, and there were only 7 of us that could do it.  Imagine looking at a page of nothing but 13 digit numbers and then at a map on a computer screen full of 15 digit numbers and finding the one with the same last 13 digits, clicking on the number on the computer and then highlighting the number on the page to show that you had clicked it on the screen.  Now, imagine doing this for 16 hours per day for 10 days and doing nothing else during your work day.  Sounds fun right? It also leads to this.....

Not only did other coworkers, who didn't have the necessary map software on their computers, bring us food on the weekends and evenings so we wouldn't have to live solely on pizza delivery, some of them stayed extra hours and read numbers to us when our eyes were getting so blurry we could no longer see.  Additionally, the other 6 coworkers who were doing this with me, let me leave at 2am Friday night/Sat morning before my surgery on Tuesday & not come back, even though I know they were there on Saturday and probably Sunday as well in preparation for the General Assembly coming  back on Monday to adopt curative legislation.  Even though it put more work on them, they understood that I could not go into surgery without a couple of days to get some rest, my blood pressure back to a normal level, and a few things done to feel like my house was ready for me to be laid up for a while.

Some great news since I last posted, my son who had deployed to Iraq actually made it back stateside before Thanksgiving due to the pull out of forces from Iraq, so even though we haven't been able to see him yet, we are thrilled that he is back safe.

So there have been other matters to attend to in the past few months than worrying about posting here, but I don't plan to give up yet.  I'm working on my goals for 2012 and will do a post about those sometime in the next few days.  They probably won't be as ambitious as they were last year, but I do better if I have some actual measurable goals so I can track my progress.

Hopefully, this time when I say I'll be back here again soon it will actually happen!

Decisions

I had a CT scan Friday morning on my back.  I've been having some issues for the past couple of years and last fall was diagnosed with Isthmic Spondylolisthesis which has been causing a great deal of sciatic nerve pain in my left leg.  I couldn't sit, I couldn't stand, I couldn't walk, I couldn't lay down, I couldn't do anything in any one position for any length of time without pain. After physical therapy, shots and pills and everything else the pain had gotten unbearable and my doctor recommended surgery.  Due to the crazy work schedule I had determined to live with the pain until this fall when it would be easier for me to take the 6-8 weeks off work that he estimates I'll need.

So that was the plan.  Except that in May I took a steroid pack for my sister's wedding, so that I could actually stand up for 20 minutes straight during her wedding.  While on the steroid pills, the pain is almost gone, but usually the very first day after I finish the steroids, the pain returns.  This time it didn't, at least not right away, and since then although I'm still in pain, it's not nearly as severe as it was.  This level of pain I could live with, although I would prefer not to, as it still damned inconvenient to not be able to find a comfortable position no matter what I'm doing.  But my doctor is now not so gung ho on the surgery, although he admits that it probably will return to the previous level of pain at some point.

Thus the CT scan today.  It serves a two-fold purpose.  One, to see if something has shifted and it's just not pinching the nerve as much now or what.  Two, to give him a better view in general in preparation for possible surgery.  I don't really want to have major surgery, and I certainly don't want unnecessary surgery, but I don't want to put the surgery off now and 6 months from now be back in the amount of pain I was 3 months ago.  So I don't know at this point.  I go back to the doctor in another week to see the results of the CT scan and I guess we'll see what he says then.