Author: Average Jane

On Sunday, I cooked and baked. That’s pretty much all I did.

I got up and baked banana bread and started a batch of French bread rising at the same time. After that, I cooked six hard-boiled eggs and a pound of small shell noodles for a batch of tuna noodle salad I was bringing to a Ronald McDonald House later in the day.

When my husband woke up, I made scrambled eggs and bacon. It was too soon to have the fresh bread with it, so I just made regular toast.

We spent the afternoon just hanging out, watching a little TV and surfing the net. I kept thinking I should go to the greenhouse and get some plants, but it was too far away and too hot outside.

Before I dropped off the tuna salad and one of the loaves of bread, I took a couple of chicken breasts out of the freezer and marinated them in white wine, garlic, Worcestershire sauce and olive oil. When I got home, I put them on the barbecue grill and began roasting green beans and walnuts in the oven with olive oil. I served the beans with a dressing made from red wine vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice, thinly sliced red onions, oregano and garlic, and garnished them with feta cheese. It’s my favorite way to serve green beans; I was afraid I’d made too much, but my husband and I ate a whole plateful. (Update: I’ll throw a I’ve put the photo and the recipe up on Flickr here when I have more time.)

Today I’m bringing my usual fruit and yogurt parfait for breakfast and I’ve made myself two sandwiches for lunch with the French bread. I’ll also take most of the banana bread into the office to share.

How was your weekend? Did you do anything more exciting than cooking and eating?

No, that isn’t a typo.

Let me just say that you know you’re ready for the weekend when you wake up on Friday morning more tired than when you went to bed. I could use a couple of nights without long, crazy dreams, too.

I’m swamped with work this week and looking forward to some weekend R&R. I don’t have anything actually scheduled (except yoga class tomorrow morning), so I should be able to get some much-needed rest.

Hubby is getting noticeably better. When he smiles, he has a The-Grinch-as-drawn-by-Chuck-Jones curl on the Bell’s Palsy side of his mouth. He says he’s not even noticing any trouble eating or drinking anymore. Best of all, he seems more open to eating healthier and checking his blood sugar more often, which I hope continues after he’s finished with his Bell’s Palsy meds.

That’s it for me today. I need to fix my hair and head out the door to meet with my usual Friday morning coffee group (herbal tea for me these days, but it’s the thought that counts). Have a great weekend!

I woke up this morning with work stuff running through my head. This has been an extremely busy week so far and it shows no signs of letting up.

As long as I was in 6 a.m. accomplishment mode, I decided it was time to catch up on the household finances. I paid our utility and medical bills, renewed my car license tags and Costco membership, and resubscribed to Archaeology magazine. Only one of my bills was late.

I still need to book my flight for BlogHer, but first I have to check in with my roomie, Suebob, to double-check when she’s planning to arrive in Chicago. There’s no hurry – I think I’m fine as long as I book by the end of June.

I’m hoping that today’s the day I get caught up on all of my late work projects, including the dreaded timesheets. I have enough hours in that I could take advantage of our company’s summer hours program and leave at noon tomorrow. I usually don’t bother, but I’m so fried this week that it’s starting to sound like a really good idea.

Tonight: A Costco run for strawberries and blackberries and a few hours of work at my dad’s office. It just doesn’t stop, does it?

Today, June 19th, is World Sauntering Day:

World Sauntering Day is a day to saunter here and there, wherever you go.
      

You can spend your life walking through life, jogging through life, or being
dragged through life. But life is far more enjoyable if you saunter through it. It’s doubly true if you saunter with a friend or loved one.
      

Sauntering is not a walk, jog, trot, or run. Sauntering is a form of
strolling. Sauntering is a very casual, yet stylish, form of movement from point A to Point B. The dictionary defines sauntering as walking along slowly, happily and aimlessly. Now, doesn’t this sound like a grand way to get around?
      

On World Sauntering Day, practice your sauntering technique. Saunter
everywhere you go.

Found via the Freakonomics blog.

Not much to report from this weekend. I did a really difficult yoga class on Saturday morning (handstands!) and spent the evening hanging out by a friend’s pool without actually swimming. I was going to take my niece to see "Nancy Drew," but I couldn’t reach her grandmother to set it up. Perhaps this weekend…

On Sunday, I lazed around the house all day, finished "Reading Lolita in Tehran," which I’d started on Friday evening, and read almost all of "Absurdistan." There was quite a lot of napping involved as well. I didn’t get dressed until it was evening and time to take my dad out to dinner for Father’s Day. Cagey is having a Reading Lolita virtual book club starting tomorrow. You don’t have to have read the book to join in, so stop by and check it out.

Today I had an unwelcome work break in the late morning to get a complete physical. Thanks to my approaching milestone birthday, I was subjected to even more indignities than usual and I have a prescription for yet another undesirable test once my b-day comes and goes. I also got a combined tetanus/whooping cough shot that’s making my arm really sore.

Tonight I’m fixing Pork Tenderloin with Curried Fruit Sauce and the whole house smells wonderful. I can’t wait until it’s done. I was scheduled to have a massage tonight, but I failed to put it on my calendar and didn’t realize I had an appointment until it was too late. Sigh.

My husband is feeling optimistic about his Bell’s Palsy recovery. He thinks he’s having an easier time talking today. He had a gig at a church yesterday and the whole congregation prayed for him, so I’m sure he’ll think that’s what’s helping. Hey, whatever works.

So that’s my life up to this moment. After dinner: a trip to the music store with our guitarist to try out different distortion pedals. Make the fun stop!

Thank you to everyone who left an encouraging comment yesterday. My husband is getting used to having his eye taped closed and he should be able to return to working in the studio tomorrow. Today he’s going to his doctor to touch base about the Bell’s Palsy and some other health issues he’s been having and he’s confident that he can drive himself (with the eye untaped, of course).

I felt bad about leaving him all alone and bored yesterday, so I cancelled my evening plans and cooked dinner for us. We watched "You, Me and Dupree," which my husband had TiVo’ed. Meh. After the hilarity of "Knocked Up," which we saw last weekend, my tolerance for unfunnyness is low.

Tonight I have a long-overdue appointment to have my hair colored and cut. I got highlights last time around but I’m not feeling ’em this year. I’ve decided to go back to all-over dark brown, at least for a while. It’s a pain to maintain because of the grey hairs, but I can deal with it. I’m very tempted to have the hair stylist bleach one lock and dye it electric blue, but I think I’ll wait until my next appointment.

On a completely unrelated note, if any of you are McSweeney’s fans, now is a good time to go shopping on their site. They’re having financial problems due to the bankruptcy of their distributor, and their solution is to have a big sale to try to boost their revenue. I bought a couple of sets of books that I’d been eyeing for a while. I already know who I want to give them to, so I might end up buying more just to have them on hand for later.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Have a lovely Thursday (can you even believe it’s Thursday already?).

I was at work yesterday afternoon when my husband called. I’d talked to him earlier in the day, but this time he had alarming news: he thought he might have had a stroke.

I questioned him closely and learned that he’d been noticing numbness and loss of muscle control on one side of his face since the previous morning. Why he didn’t mention it sooner, I can’t imagine. I wanted him to go immediately to the emergency room but he resisted, even though I insisted that time is of the essence when someone has a stroke. I looked up the phone number for Ask-A-Nurse and got him to agree to call them and then call me right back.

As I waited for a return call, I paced back and forth next to my desk. My phone rang and my husband said, "Come home."

After a white-knuckle drive home in which I broke the speed limits of every road I was on, I got him in the car and headed to the hospital. On the way, I quizzed him about his symptoms and found out that he wasn’t experiencing any weakness in the arm or leg on that side. "It might be Bell’s Palsy," I suggested.

He said the nurse on the phone had said the same thing and asked how I knew about Bell’s Palsy. I told him what I always tell him in situations like that, "I know everything. When are you going to realize that?"

If you can’t joke in a crisis, when can you joke?

During check-in at the emergency room, another nurse brought up Bell’s Palsy, and, sure enough, the doctor confirmed that diagnosis. He still ordered an EKG, blood tests and a CAT scan because my husband is diabetic and has high blood pressure, but all of the tests ruled out a stroke.

We were in and out of the hospital in about two hours, which must be some kind of emergency room record. Even before we did the paperwork and presented our insurance card, the care was swift and the staff very friendly and considerate.

They put my husband on an anti-viral and a steroid, both with lengthy, insanely convoluted dosing schedules that caused me to have to draw a chart to make sure he doesn’t miss any doses. In most people, the worst symptoms subside within 2-3 weeks. Chances are, he’ll make a full recovery in a few months.

The nurse taped his droopy eye shut and he’ll have to put in eye drops frequently whenever his eye is open. There’s no immediate remedy for the droopy side of his mouth – even with a straw he still dribbles when he drinks.

Neither the doctor nor the Internet could provide much insight into how someone gets Bell’s Palsy. My husband has a cold right now, so it’s possible that the same virus caused inflammation in the cranial nerve that produces the symptoms. Or it could be something else. Who knows?

I’m so relieved that he has something relatively minor that I hardly know what to think. Sure, I’ll have to drive him around for a while until he can ditch the eye patch, but that’s a small price to pay. Whew.

I’ve noticed something interesting lately about the way I react to things I hate to do.

It first caught my attention in my vocal lessons. There’s an exercise that involves pressing on your face under your cheekbones with your fingers and "bubbling" scales by blowing air through your slack lips. It looks stupid, it gets really difficult on the high notes, and it makes your lips and face tired. I hated doing it.

My vocal coach was very insistent that it’s a valuable exercise and I should keep at it until I improved. As much as I despised practicing it, I kept at it. She was right – it does help in significant ways. I don’t even mind doing it anymore, although it would be a stretch to say that I like it.

Yesterday in yoga class, I ran across something else I hate to do: backbends. It isn’t that I’m not strong or flexible enough to do them, it’s…something else. I really couldn’t put my finger on what it was until the teacher started talking about something I’d heard in various yoga classes and seminars over the years. She mentioned that backbends "open the heart" in ways that are more than just metaphorical. Sometimes, she said, people cry after they’ve done them.

As someone who does an unhealthy amount of emotional suppression, I’ve always pooh-poohed the idea that a yoga pose could make me cry. After all, I’d heard the same thing about deep-tissue massage and I’ve never had any kind of emotional reaction to it (beyond "ow!" in certain circumstances).

We went through a series of backbend poses and made our way to camel pose. My backbend-aversion kept me from being able to bend backward to reach my heels, but the teacher had us positioned with our thighs against the wall and blocks by our ankles. The minute I managed to bend back and reach the blocks with my hands while keeping my legs on the wall, I felt as though I were going to burst into tears. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t all that physically challenging – it was just the successful backbend itself that caused the reaction. Huh.

Now I feel driven to practice backbends until my fear and avoidance of them goes away.

I don’t know exactly why I’ve started to embrace things I once went out of my way to avoid. Maybe it has to do with getting older and wiser and realizing that most things aren’t as bad as I think they’re going to be once I give them enough of a chance.

Can you think of anything you hate to do that you’ve come to accept or even like once you pushed yourself into continuing?

My Soroptimist Club presidency is coming to an end and I received a $100 gift certificate to a greenhouse as my parting gift. I went there on Saturday afternoon and strolled through the aisles, but left empty-handed because I couldn’t decide what I wanted.

On Sunday, I armed myself with my long-handled loppers, a pruning saw, a hedge trimmer and a leaf blower and tackled the trash trees and weeds around the yard. I filled two construction-grade trash bags with branches, garbage, leaves and shingle fragments from our roof replacement earlier in the spring. Amazingly, I’m not that sore today. It must be all the yoga.

Now that I’ve cleared some space for desirable plant life around my yard, I think I’m ready to make a list and start shopping for flowers and shrubbery. Any recommendations?