It is a beautiful Sunday afternoon.  Sun is shining.  It is in the 60s.  It totally sucks being on pager duty.

I went on a several block hustle this morning… until the pager went off and I had to come back home… sigh.

Christmas tree is wonderful company… so is coffee with peppermint mocha creamer.

I’m tired this afternoon.  I feel like i could take a totally forever nap this afternoon.  I don’t feel so bad anymore though, because I realize that tired is a part of me…

I’m starting to try to take stock in why I’m writing (given that I know no one is actually reading this). I want to help someone who is facing what I am facing… or what I have been facing…

I think it is really depressing that, as soon as I was really starting to make progress in loosing weight… I get RA

And… another chapter begins… or maybe… a chapter that I didn’t know had already begun sneaks in.

It has been a bad couple months.  I just guess I’m starting to realize how bad.  For starters, I’m not sure where the whole half month of October went nor most of November.  Thanksgiving wasn’t too terribly bad. I managed the turkey and it turned out really well.

But I have been not feeling “right” for a while.  Not sure why.  Heck, not sure how long… but I know that the last time I felt really really right was at least in June… and it has been getting progressively worse.

It started in my toes (at least that is where I recognize it as being first noticed consciously).  The wide part of my feet got swelled and didn’t really go down.  It hurt and it hurt continuously for a couple weeks.  Shoes got tight (the pair that I got for my birthday.  It couldn’t have bene gainig weight… I had/have been loosing.  Wasn’t sure why… figured it was just one of those weird woman things…

My left wrist got a swelled spot on the wrist below my thumb that would come and go…

My fingers would get tight… felt weird to make a fist.  then I couldn’t close the fingers the whole way… I couldn’t make a fist.

First the left hand

Then the right

Weird, huh?  The orthepedist told me that I would get osteoarthritis in my right hand becuase of the break 10 years ago and how badly it healed.

Went to the doctor (after much discussion about my using my hands entirely too much… ) becuase I just couldn’t deal with the inconvenience or the way I was feeling in my joints any more.

Did I do the research first?  Duh.  I had a hunch what it might be.

I was hoping I was being a hypocondriac.

I wasn’t

The DR sent me for blood tests

and xrays

and called me two days later, not the 4 they told me they would

and said you have posotive RA factor and you need to see a rheumatologist.

More blood

more x-rays…

now i’m on prednizone and hurting less… scared… and… dealing with reality.

Remember, if you shoot for the stars, even if you miss, you are likely to at least land on the moon.

If you aim low and make it, you don’t REALLY know if you would have been able to make it further or not.  If you aim high and you make it, you made it!  If you aim high, and you don’t make it, the next time out of the gate, you just have to try harder…

And heck, once you have made it to the moon, you are just that much closer to your actual goal!

I know that I’m not ready for MY ultimate Running goal (Goofy’s race and a half… a marathon and a half marathon in one weekend) but I know I can hit my Race for the Cure goal (5k in 6 weeks) and I believe I can reach my goal of a half marathon in February (and running, right now, is so good for stress).  That should reach me to the moon.  The next goal, if I’m reasonable, is a full marathon, or a couple of them spaced reasonably far apart.  That might make it to Pluto (Uranus, since Pluto isn’t a planet any more).  Maybe I will hang out on Pluto for a little bit, making sure I can live there and not die from the atmosphere… <grin>

Then I will look for the next jump, and the next, and the next.

As long as you keep moving forward, you are moving forward.  It is when you stop growing that you start to turn brown and wither.

Okay, I’m really not ready for the rain to be over, but I really wasn’t in much of a mood to be out running in it this morning… not carrying squirrel’s backpack and trying to keep her dry on the way to school and wading waist high drenched grass through ankle deep puddles… hidden by the waist high grass.

How DO you lift your feet straight up to keep them dry in THAT case???

I hadn’t planned on falling face first into the mud on the way home… or almost getting hit by a car who “forgot” that you are supposed to wear your headlights turned ON in the rain.

None of it was planned, but all of it was my workout today

what fun…

Okay, so… maybe not ENTIRELY guilt free.  If it weren’t for guilt, I probably wouldn’t have gone today.  I wanted desperately to go yesterday, but it was a way rainy morning and I wanted just as despirately to play with my electronics.  This morning it looked like it might decide to be rainy, but I figured it wasn’t rainy yet and I could probably stay reasonably close to home.

I didn’t want to get stuck around the back side of the park if it really cut loose, so I decided to “just” hit the park creek, to see what I could see from the rain… then I swung up around through the ball park, checked out the changes there, and headed out to the road…. back up through the ballpark parking lot and around towards home.

On my way out, I managed to loose my bandanna from being tied to my fanny pack.  It was just a trifle annoying.  I like my pink bandanas and I figured I would never be able to find it… that I would have to haul my butt to walmart to buy a duplicate.  The pink ones are important to me.  Pink is the color of Breast Cancer support… and “The Pink One” (Princess Aurora)… sorry… it is a humor filled day.  I didn’t have anything to wipe my the sweat (and it was humid enough today… that I was majorly sweaty) but I made do (went to the bathroom at the convenience store and got paper towels… ).

It was great to see what all the rain did.  It washed rocks to all the wrong places. It made SO much mud.  I don’t deal well with treading through mud on a good day, but this… man… this was slippy and slidey and really hard to navigate.  And the mud here is all wrong… not like mud back home, slick but sticky too… so getting it off your shoes is a real treat.

Going around the ball park was really cool.  We didn’t actually make any games this year… so getting up close and personal with the diamond was really neat.  There are new pictures, new signs, new construction… I love the really neat posts outside the new Intel Private place they just built.  The posts are regular concrete posts, they have baseballs on top of them (the baseballs are concrete too and are the size of basketballs).

The parking lot was full of shallow puddles.  Shiny in the early morning… cloudiness.

There were lots of people out this morning.  Passed a lady and her dog (her running partner)

I have spent a good bit of time figuring out the wonder of the new toy.  You can hold it two different ways and it seems to automagically figure out what direction the video is supposed to be seen in.  Holding it the wrong way and it doesn’t pivot it itself.  And trying to find a way to pivot it on my own is a REAL treat… NOT.  I can’t find anything that will do it for me without spending a fortune.

This is what happens if you hold it in your left hand with the camera to the right…

Holding it vertically with the camera down actually will play correctly, as well.

It was neat talking to the iPod this morning, though.  I figure that mom will enjoy the play by play commentary.  No one looked at me too weirdly while I was talking to myself.  I figured out that I can take video (is this podcasting??? ) and still keep up a pretty brisk pace.

You know… it’s funny… my toes hurt this morning (like I needed to crack the toe knuckles) and my knee felt like it was black and blue.  After my outing, I felt a little sore, but I feel so much better.  I already know that tomorrow morning I’m heading out at about 4:30 for an hour before I’m back at it.  That time of day, it will be up and down the streets of the housing area.  But it will be for an hour.

How many steps during my outing today?

11,600

580 calories down…

Back home, eggs and toast and black coffee and tea and water.

Today was a wonderful day

OH my god.  Went to the company picnic (what fun that was… NOT), had BBQ, watched people drink and become more stupider (yes, I know it is incredibly bad grammar) and got massively rained on (Yeah rain).  On the plus side on the rain… we got a lot, but just north of us got 12 inches in 17 hours… not pretty

ANY way…

Like the Christmas party, they have door prizes.  I’ve been to several of the picnics and several of the Christmas Parties and I’ve never gotten anything but the cutesy little things that they give everyone at the Christmas part for showing up.

Yesterday was the exception to the rule.  Yesterday my name was drawn and I got to go pick from whatever was left.  The really really cool stuff was gone… like the TV and the computer and the WII and all of the gift cards, but the iPod nano was still there and so was the movie camera.  The movie camera might have been nicer, I’m not sure.  But I got a nano.  And the chick from HR said that, they talked to the Apple store (and they still had the receipt for buying it) and anyone who got the Apple stuff (there were a couple shuffles, and a couple nanos) could take them into the Apple store and exchange them, since the boxes were still sealed, for the newer model.  The nano that was there was a silver 4G.

I heard all of the hoopla on the iPod nano 5G that Apple put out just this week (hey, I am a geek) and thought it sounded interesting… not something I would actually be able to justify spending money on any time soon, but interesting… So, I snagged up the nano.

The picnic was just about 3 miles from the mall where one of the two local Apple stores are here so after the picnic I high tailed it to the mall (first time I’d ever driven there all alone) and went to the Apple store and exchanged the 4G for a shiny Pink 16 gig 5G.

I have a new toy!

I was actually counting on running this morning with it so I could try it out, but it is raining too hard this morning to use it without some kind of protection on it to keep it semi dry… and I can’t complain, as long as we don’t get the kind of rain they got to floody floody the towns and the highway yesterday, we desperately need the rain.

So… I will have to put off seeing what I can capture in my travels until another day.

I did do some digging, last night after I got home, to see what exactly the deal is with the new toy.

It has a pedometer… one that apparently you can sort of synch with Nike’s running site.  That is a toy I will have to work at playing with.  Something that automagically uploads data so I can track it better is a good thing.  Interesting thing on the pedometer, it wants you to put in your weight and it calculates how many calories you are burning as you walk.  A plus from a geek who is working to get more fit perspective.  The pedometer keeps track of your history, too.  Getting to it and viewing it is a little quirky but it is neat.  It also allows you to set goals for numbers of steps, and has either always on mode or manual turn it on when you are exercising mode.

The video camera (which is video, not stills, but I think I can probably find software that can dink around with that…  B-) … ) records pretty well all in all.  It isn’t like having a ‘real’ video camera that takes full screen sized movies… these ones are about the size of the videos you see on youtube’s sscreen, but the quality is good and the ‘camera’ weighs as much as… well… an iPod nano… so it won’t weigh you down during a run (or a race) and the 16 gig will probably record a pretty decent amount of movie.

– there are 2 drawbacks here, though.

1. Most important to know… you can’t listen to anything at the same time you are taking movies.  As soon as the video camera utility opens, the music shuts off.  I was actually counting on it staying on so I could run to the music while taping at least parts of my run.  Not going to happen.  Will have to rely on backup music for that… but the light weight feel of the nano means that adding in another very light weight MP3 player won’t interfere much with my running even in races.
2. There are currently not any cases (at least not that I saw) that will attach this to you and let the camera viewer be what is on the outside.  This means that I’m going to have to get creative and make my own that I can wear with either camera out or screen and controller out or carry the camera in my hand.  I’m pretty sure I will be working on the creative getting side and make something that I can wear either on my arm facing forward or pinned to my chest facing forward or on a lanyard.  I expect all kinds of new cases will come out eventually… some that will take this into account.  There are actually some cases available (none at the iPod store yesterday though) that have little opening for the camera and mic as well as for the front of the iPod… I found one on the internet that is a silicon skin that I think I’m going to buy (it is cheap and it will help keep it dry and I can figure out how to hook it to something or build something around it…

It has a built in voice recorder that I haven’t tried out yet (on my to do list for today) which will be great for recording myself thinking while running.  Again… it is light weight and small and if I tried to use all of my electronics during training I would actually weigh 10 pounds more… so even if I don’t use this one for music at the same time as other things, I can use if for the other things…

It has some neat new games, multiple world wide clocks that you can set up (it defaults to California… duh) but you can edit that one (to get it to take the new place, you have to push the round middle button and the “got to the right” button at the same time) and add others.  There are alarms you can set, multiple calendars and a stop watch.

The on screen graphics for each thing are… interesting.  For me, having a microphone picture on the voice recorder or a shutter opening on the video recorder doesn’t add a lot to the experience but it is neat and I know that it wasn’t designed really with people like me in mind, more for people like my kid…

It is actually a rather utilitarian little gadget.

Now… to put it through its paces…

Feel like an idiot.

I made the mistake of looking up pictures of past marathons.

I feel like such a loser… Everyone is running.  Everyone is so INCREDIBLY skinny.  I feel like a massively huge cow that is a walking looser…

This too, I know, will pass, but for tonight, I feel like I’m less than adequate…

WooHoo

My shirt came today!!!

And, what’s even better… DH thought it wouldn’t fit… AND IT DOES!!! I’m thrilled that it came, I’m even more thrilled that it is “only” a large and it fits fine!  I know what I’m wearing to work tomorrow!!!

I’ve committed to not only raising money for Komen Marathon for the Cure, but Marathon Kids.

Komen Team Marathon is for Mom and for Aunt Bea.  Marathon Kids is for Des and Trooper… for everyone that faces the possibility of Type 2 diabetes (Little bro didn’t have a choice, or a way to avoid it… other people can sometimes keep it from happening to them…

I want everyone to know that anything is possible… Getting Fit, Running 26 miles (26 miles all at once, .25 miles at a time, walking, skipping… however you get there)… If I can get here, anyone can to wherever they want to be… 26 miles in a year a hundred yards at a time… it is possible.

Sometimes I wonder if trying for all of this is worth it.  Today, I feel like all of this is worth it…

I am sitting in the breezy side yard listening to the birds, the air conditioner and the quiet.  There are a couple dogs chatting with each other a block or so away.  Other than that, it is one of the quietest places I’ve been in forever…

Tonight, I hurt.  Yesterday’s run was SO worth it, but tonight, I hurt.  I ache. It is a good hurt, the kind of hurt that is “no pain, no gain” hurt, but it is hurt none the less.

Today was an interesting day.

I was so excited about getting out and hitting it… I got almost everything ready last night… all laid out so it was all ready this morning.  I considered woosing out when I got up but I really wanted to do this so got my butt in gear.

I waited till it was starting to get daylight because I’m dumb but not stupid.  The sun wasn’t the whole way up, but it was daylight enough that I could see what was coming at me and what all was in the surroundings.  I got a couple really pretty shots of sunrise (there is something to be said for the squirrel not liking the smallish light weight camera that we got her… I get to use it when I run and it doesn’t weigh me down too much).

I made it to the big road at just the time that the first hot air balloon headed off.  I got a couple killer pictures of the balloon taking off and floating over the road…. made the bend at the convenience store (after my first drink of water) just as the next balloon team was getting the basket set up for their take off.  Got to see the burner lit as they tested it.  I slowed down to take my pictures, but didn’t opt to sit and watch the team get ready.  Maybe I should have, ordinarily I would have, but I didn’t.  I needed to do the route for some kind of timing.

But it was okay, it was SO worth the day.

The creek where the dog likes to play in the nice cold water was a dry rocky creek bed.  Sad.  It has been such a dry summer and even the rain from night before last didn’t make any difference… but it was interesting to see the flood pole next to a creek that wasn’t even there…

Onward and upward.  Got a couple more pics of the first balloon as I passed the soccer field.

Noticed (duh) that there were an awful lot of cars passing me at 7:20 in the morning even in the park, even on such a beautiful morning (only 72 degrees!!!!).  Figured out in a bit what was going on.  The local fitness training company has a recurring outing in the park every Saturday. I looked up the site when I got home… There was a really nice lady that told me I should join!  Yeah… might actually be nice to join such a group, but not for $100 for 24 weeks… thanks but no thanks…

It got me thinking (since I was out on my own with no one to talk to and nothing but music in my head and nothing but feet and street) that I don’t know if I would really want to rely on a group (much as I might really enjoy the fellowship of other people like me) for my success.  The reason I took up this kind of exercise is so I don’t have to rely on anyone else’s schedule… any one else for my success or failure.    It would probably be good to have someone to talk to who has been there… who is going through the same stupidity that I am going through, but if I have to pay someone to talk to me (and that person doesn’t have a degree in psychology….) I don’t think it is probably really worth it.

Passing a runner (yeah, she was running, I was only maintaining a fast walk) who waved as she passed made me think that I probably just need to keep up the solitary training… It may not be as safe as running (or walking) in a pack, but as long as I’m careful and keep my cell phone at the ready… it will probably be my best option…

Made the bend at the park, got a picture of the people from the group running across the bridge… balloon in the background… you guessed it, more pictures.

Another drink.

I really love my squat little stainless water bottle.  It fits perfectly in my fanny pack and has just about the right amount of water for a 2 hour outing.

Out of the park and onto the beautiful wide new sidewalk.

Waved at the passing police car (they usually don’t let on they see you, so this one waving was really nice).

passed one couple almost at the point where the sidewalk ends.

took out onto the newly dug up roadbed, so I didn’t have to do the last several hundred yards to the light… it would have been better for my pace to stay on the road…

6.75 miles, 1 hour 45 min (including cool down and stretching)

cool bath (SUCKS to not have water come out of the faucet COLD but rather tepid.. ), 2 eggs, a piece of toast and salsa…

Now, an hour and a half later, I’m sitting here thinking about my outing.  I feel wonderful right now.  It was SO worth going out this morning.  I wasn’t overly sweaty (although I did smell like a goat when I got home) during my run.  I’m not terribly sore right now… I love the change in my normal routine..  I’m thinking that this might be a  to do list thing for tomorrow.