The Real Definition

We've all heard of bi-polar people. I always thought it was simply because of the extreme up and downs and some expert somewhere decided that poles were as oppposite as you could get, so bi-polar it was.

Nope, not really.

Bi-polar came about because of Chicago weather. We always joke that you can have all four seasons in a single day, but really that's a joke. It doesn't really happen.

Right now, I'm not laughing. Today is the first day of spring. The past few days have been wonderful. I've gone outside without a coat. The wee ones have been using their spring coats. My dear friend the sun has been showing his face, and it has been glorious.

Today? Not so much. We are going from one pole to the other here - winter spring winter - and I can only hope that our bi-polar trip finds some equillibrium soon and bring me back my precious spring.

This morning when I woke up:

This afternoon, with the snow not yet letting up:

C'mon. I want my spring back. Enough with the joke. It's just cruel after a long, cold, dreary winter.

I'm Not The Only One Who Hates Winter

It's really getting cold in Chicago. When you listen to the weather forecast on radio or tv, they always talk about the windchill now. Because even though the thermometer says that it's 28 degrees, that nasty wind blowing right through you and freezing your bones makes it feel like it's only 16 degrees. And it's important that we understand this difference. Why, I haven't yet figured out, but it must be important or they wouldn't remind us so often, right?

I've started my appropriate layering. I've moved out of the long sleeve t-shirts and blouses and into heavier sweaters and sweatshirts and fleeces even. I'm burrowing in, spending as little time outside as I possibly can.

And I'm not the only one.

Pshaw, you say. It's winter. It happens every year; get over it.

I've got proof though. Honest to goodness proof. I heard it tonight. Or rather, I heard them. They're back.

We live in the suburbs with a nature conservancy behind us with lots of nice trees and such. Even when the leaves are off the trees in winter, there are no houses to see behind us anywhere. It's really quite nice, except for some of the wildlife.

I've figured out how to deal with the deer. The mice, however, confound me. This is the second winter that they've realized how good people have it and snuck into our attic. I hear them scritch scritching around above my head when I'm sitting in the family room and when I'm in bed trying to sleep. They're nocturnal creatures, apparently, so they don't bother me during the day -- only when I'm trying to relax.

Last year, I hired exterminators in November when I first heard the noises. The nice man came and placed poison in the appropriate places around the attic (the kind that makes them thirsty so they run outside). We waited until I heard no noises for two weeks before he came back and filled in five holes into the attic that they found. They have a six month guarantee, which unfortunately I had to utilize. Twice. They found some more holes the second time but not the third. Fortunately, April arrived, and they went back outside and left us alone.

Until tonight. Little did I know how much mice hate winter. I'll be hauling out the yellow pages again to call a pest company. Given the success the folks had last year, I may be using a different company. Of course, those folks actually called me back. The first company I called couldn't be bothered.

Add this to the list of reasons to move out of the frigid north.

I Need A Bath!

As I've mentioned a few times now, I'll be the maid of honor for a friend's wedding on May 3, and we're wearing *gasp* satin. And my friend is a size 4. Needless to say, I've been trying to flatten my tummy since so wonderfully inspired by Dawn Meehand of Because I Said So! http://www.mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/.

Thinking about the activities I could do that would melt off pounds (HA!), running immediately came to mind. Mostly because I'm insane. I've never been a runner. I've never run. I remember when I was in grade school and had to do the Presidential Physical Fitness challenges and passed the situp portion only, if I remember correctly.

For the running part of the test, we had to run around the school three times. I had no chance of running even halfway around it, as I just couldn't or didn't run even as a kid. I remember my goal was always to finish ahead of certain kids just to save a miniscule amount of pride while Ben Nelson and Lizzie Lebens were done before I finished my first lap. Gee, I wonder why I never thought running was fun.

So let's fast forward a couple years.... One of my first posts discussed how winter just wasn't ending, and I couldn't start running until it did because my only option is to run outside, and I'm a wimp. As a brief update, after the crystalline snow last Saturday, it truly snowed on Sunday. Monday just a fake snow, but snow nonetheless. Later in the week, it slowly started to warm up AND the sun came out, too!

On Friday, my parents took the kids for an overnight visit (which turned into two nights, but that's another post) around 4pm, so I decided to start my running right then, as it was still sunny and relatively warm. By warm, I mean 42 degrees. My sense of heat and cool is truly warped after this winter.

In preparation for running, I had discovered a website that had podcasts for each week of the Couch Potato to 5K program. Being the lazy person I am -- ironic, no? -- I asked my husband to kindly download the podcasts from iTunes (free, yay!) and put them on my iPod. Sexist, maybe, but making my iPod work is his job.

I grabbed my iPod and started searching for the podcast, as I figured I'd better do it then, as I didn't want to look like a geek standing outside my house trying to figure it out. I found one podcast, but not all nine weeks. As I started playing it to get a sense of what I was going to be listening to while running, I realized that this was the podcast for week nine. Definitely not going to happen. Went through every part of my iPod and that was the only podcast on it. Patient me, I turned on the desktop (it's over 5 years old and slower than me jogging) to see if it was on the computer but somehow magically didn't make it to my iPod. I spent about 10 minutes searching for the podcasts but could find only week 9.

Now I'm starting to get discouraged, and I'm wondering if someone out there is trying to tell me that I'm just not supposed to run. Ever. But I'm stubborn as all get out, so I persist and open up my browser to find the podcasts again. Except that the Internet connection isn't working on that computer. I go through all the options I can think of to try to reconnect, but no dice. I don't even have the option of viewing my wireless networks to disconnect and connect again. After 20 minutes, I call hubby to ask him but he's no help over the phone and can't figure out anything beyond what I did. To be honest, I still don't know if that computer finally submitted or is still refusing to acknowledge the Internet.

I do have a laptop, but it's my work laptop, and downloading things is somewhat frowned upon. However, I figured that I could at least download a file. That's when I discovered that to download anything from iTunes, you have to install a program, which won't happen on the laptop. But knowing how everything is available somewhere on the net, I don't give up. Did I mention that I'm stubborn? I finally found an mp3 file that I can download. Except that I can't connect my iPod to my laptop. Fortunately, I have a jump drive, so I load the file to my jump drive and transfer it to the desktop. From that point, it only took me 15 minutes to figure out how to get that file onto my iPod.

By now, it's 5:30, and it's definitely gotten cooler, but I'm not giving up! I refuse! So I go outside, turn on the iPod and start my brisk walk. I actually survived all 8 one minute runs and the intervening brisk walks. I did the whole thing, and I was really proud of myself. My chest of course felt like there were iron bands being wrapped around it and squeezed, but I still did it.

I have since found out that a neighbor saw me and wanted to know why his wife wasn't running with me. She's not a runner either -- or at least not since college. To me, she's a runner. For God's sake, she plays soccer! Voluntarily! But I explained the program and what I was doing, and now I have a running buddy on Fridays and Sundays (during the week, we'll be running on different days). Way cool.

Except for the part about how I have to run again on Sunday. Hmm, that's today. For some reason, when I woke up this morning, my quads were really sore. Like the tops of them were being smashed with a spiked iron bar every time I took a step. Apparently running on Friday and then doing yoga on Saturday were not what my quads had in mind and they were on strike. Plus, today was again one of the days where winter tried to make one last push, so we didn't get out of the 30s today. And my friend has an uncle in the hospital with massive blood clots, so she wasn't going to be able to join me.

So what did I do? I ran errands this morning, went to my parents in the afternoon and had dinner there, then came home with the kids around 6. So of course, that's the time to go running. Not that it's gotten even colder, the wind has picked up, and the sun is over the houses. But I still went. And I survived again. Other than my quads squealing with every step, it actually went a bit better today. The iron bands squeezing my chest were now at least just made out of aluminum.

Until, of course, I sat down. Now I really hurt. And it's getting worse. I'm actually limping. And as my title suggests, I need a bath! Any guesses where I'm headed in about thirty seconds?

Oh, and for anyone who's thinking they can't run but has some sense of insanity and thinks they may want to try, it's totally doable. Find the podcasts at http://www.ullreys.com/robert/Podcasts/ for each week and go for it. It's so much better than trying to find mile markers or looking at your watch every third second to see if your sixty seconds are up yet.

I will say that I don't have the courage yet to figure out when my nine weeks of getting up to speed (ba dump bump) are up and I could possibly see how well I'm really doing by entering a 5K. A friend of mine sent me links for the cool 5Ks in Chicago that she wants me to enter with her, but I'm not quite ready to figure that out yet. I'll get there eventually though.

Oh yeah... and somehow I gained two pounds between Friday and today. I think my quads bribed other parts of my body to sabotage my efforts!

I Jinxed It!

So around the new year, I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Because I Said So (http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/) where Dawn was talking about new years resolutions and how she wanted to lose weight this year. Well, duh. Do you know a woman who doesn't want to lose weight? So I kept thinking about it. And yep, I decided I wanted to lose weight, too. And yes, me being me, I couldn't just leave it at that. I have to do something about it. I set myself an actual goal. I want to run 5Ks. Not just a 5K or a specific one, but apparently I decided that running is something I want to do on a regular basis. I don't always understand my thought processes either.

So I found something called Couch Potato to 5K. It sounded easy. It just takes nine weeks of gradually increasing the amount of time and distance you run, and suddenly, you're running 5K. That sounds like something I can do.

I have just a couple very small problems:
#1 I don't belong to a gym. I won't belong to a gym until my kids are in first grade, probably. During the day, I'm either working or doing something with the kids or volunteering. At night, I know me. I'm not going to go to a gym often enough to make it cost effective. That means I need to run outside, which is fine until it leads to problem...
#2 I live in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. It gets cold here in the winter, and I decided I wanted to learn to run in the middle of January. This year, not only has it been cold, but we've had enough snow to freeze over a certain netherworld. With a neighborhood where people don't always shovel their sidewalks (a topic for another post, I assure you) or build giant snowmen or igloos in the middle of the sidewalk, running outside is not just silly but dangerous.

In my head, I'm ok with that. I'm still going to learn to run 5Ks. In fact, I had DH download a nine part podcast that talks you through each week's workouts. Yep, I'm ready. I even bought a cool neoprene thing that goes around my arm to hold my iPod. I'm so ready. As soon as it gets warm enough to start running outside.

Now I won't lie to you. We've had some decent days in the past month or so. I think one day we even got up to 50 degrees. But really, what's the point of running (ok, walking with a few bursts of jogging) when the next day we go back to the deep freeze? I keep telling myself that we're almost to spring, so I'm almost going to start running. Really. Almost. I swear!

Then I saw the forecast this past Tuesday. On Saturday, it was going to be 49 degrees and sunny. On Sunday, 51. Monday was in the mid-40s. I was going to be able to start running this weekend! I was so excited! This morning, it was 12 degrees when I woke up. And windy. And it had snowed a little last night.

Now seriously, the snow was just a dusting, but it was the perfect amount of dusting to show me that someone, somewhere is making a joke at my expense. How can a day that's supposed to be 49 degrees instead be 12 with a dusting of snow? As I'm fuming internally about this, I look more closely outside. There wasn't just a dusting of snow. It was still snowing! And it wasn't a snowstorm kind of snow. For those of you who live where it snows, you know what I'm talking about. It's the tiny, crystalline, almost invisible bits of snow that are almost invisible unless you're looking at them in just the right light.

I went to yoga this morning, and it was still doing the laughing snow in my face thing. I ran errands, and still the remnants of winter reminded me who's in charge. What can you do? I'm obviously not running this weekend.

I got home and DH asked if I'd seen the forecast for next week. Innocently, I asked what it was. Mid-40s starting on Wednesday. Maybe next weekend is my weekend to start running?