I love my husband. Lately, he can't seem to do anything right. Take grocery lists. I, as a rule, do not make them.  Recently, though, I have come to the understanding that if I want exactly what I want, then I must give the list to the man who does the shopping. So I did this recently, figuring I was doing my part for clear, concise marital communication.  What did he do? Left the list at home. Bought tater tots instead of hashed browns. A big, fat three pound bag of store brand tater "puffs".  I was not amused. I made the effort, why can't he? Sigh.

One of the ingredients for clear, concise marital communication is that both parties need to be invested in the idea and the practices that ensure said marital communication. Time for me to remind him he likes that. Clear communication, that is. One of the factors affecting our life right now is that in addition to being the local FD Chief, he is now deep into a full time course to become an EMT. Four days a week he goes to a Middlebury College J-term course from nine to six to become an EMT, because Ripton doesn't have enough EMT's and is even shorter of them during the work day. So my husband, the Happy Retiree, is making sure that he has at least one more EMT he can depend on: himself. There is a part of me that is proud of him and this work he has taken on. Then there's the cranky, bitchy, demanding part of me that wishes he wasn't so involved with them and more involved with me. 

I know that a great root in this problem, my deep seated neediness is that I am jealous of him. Jealous that he is retired and living the retired life he had envisioned for himself. I am ensconced in the work a day world. Prior to this j-term class i would come home from work and he would have the house warm.  Most of the time he would have dinner bubbling along or in the works and I could ice my back and watch Dr. Who. 

Deep in my soul I am the stereotyped fifties working man who wants dinner on the table and the attention of the little woman. 

I am frustrated that I  am this way. Last night I came home first. I fed the dog and cat, got the dog outside.  Built the fire in the wood stove. Made a casserole from leftovers. Envisioned my spouse walking through the door and being home and talking and starting our weekend off "right."

Instead I had a phone call from Ross, asking me to tell The Chief that they were back from the fire! So I knew said spouse would not be home anytime soon. He has to drive right by the Fire Station on his way home, so I knew he would stop. I then proceeded to take three additional messages for the Fire Chief while I did the dirty dishes.  He did have the decency to call me and tell me he was going to be late as he was at the station. I did the sensible thing: I pouted.  And then I ate something healthy.  Eventually, he came home and I was able to ask him about his day.  And got to hear him talk about the day and the fire and calling for mutual aid from his class so the short staffed daytime volunteers would have enough help to deal with the structure fire they were called to. The fortunate thing is that no one was hurt. 

I did get my husband home and talking. It wasn't the way I envisioned it, but I still got what I needed. Now what am I going to do with those blessed tater tots?

Blessings abound

Here is my Happy New Year Gratitude List:

LoraBoraLabraDora-the softest furred, most devoted dog I have ever had. She's a comfort and a joy.  She makes me laugh when I'm down, listens when I talk and never tells my secrets.
Erik-friend, husband, lover. Accepts me as I am. Keeps me safe and warm. Makes me smile and laugh and want to strangle him, sometimes. He's a good human being.
Friends-they come from so many different places:my past, my present, the Internet, work, through my family. They are my family here in Vermont.

My sister, Sandy: My hat is off to her. She works full time nights, listens when I need a kind ear that isn't covered in fur. Deals with our mother's deteriorating mental status and physical decline in ways I could not.

Firewalking: I've done it twice now:Once, before my back surgery two and one half years ago and again this past September. Firewalking has helped me hone my resolve to transform sorrow and overeating into joy.  A pleasant side effect has been the loss of twenty six pounds. It has also shown me how much better I feel when I do not eat sugar and abundant carbohydrates. I fell off the wagon a bit with the holidays, but not as badly as I have in the past. The memory of walking on the coals is making it easier to get up, brush myself off and get on with it again.

Oil pastels: I love to press their colors onto my thumbs and selected fingers and transfer them to paper. They make for love smudged pictures of the things I love in my life.

The ability to walk. I took it for granted and lost the ability to do it comfortably. Today I am struggling with pain that makes it hard to walk, (Thank you fibro and sciatica!) but I am glad that I can still walk.  i can still enjoy the trees, the birds, the fresh air as winter turns to spring, the sun on my skin and putting one foot in front of the other. 

My recumbent exercise bike. Helps keep the pain and stiffness away.

Orb Weaver cheese with Ritz crackers and red, seedless grapes. A tasty lunch or snack that never grows old.

My children.  Beloved Firstborn, Boy Wonder and the addition this year of Fyxen.  My sons are the best thing I have ever done. And now I have a new daughter-in-law.  I love their company. I savor the times they come to visit and am proud of them.

My job. This is a mixed blessing. Sometimes I absolutely hate it.  It is so different from some of the more hands on nursing that i have done that it's hard to feel as if i am having a positive impact on the lives of the people with whom I work.  Dealing with insurance companies over prior authorizations for medications can feel so fruitless sometimes. Usually, though, I can find the information in patient charts that is needed to obtain for the patient what they need. I am very good at reviewing charts and finding the relevant information.

My nieces: Kim, Kate and Rachael. Beautiful, lively young women who make it possible for me to see the world through a fresher perspective. I enjoy the time spent with them and wish I lived closer.

Living in the Green Mountain National Forest.  It's beautiful here. And quiet.  Too short of a growing season, it makes me appreciate the crops we can grow so much more than if the season were longer. I love to sway with the trees when the breezes blow. Trees are such forgiving beings. Hug them and they offer solace. Talk to them and they resonate with wisdom, if only one would sit at their base and absorb the knowledge through the base of the spine, into the deeper parts of being.

Music. Energizes, soothes, makes me want to move my body and slough off the dead skin of old energy. Beauty in a note, a movement.

This is good for now. Blessings abound 

I know i shouldn't be sulking, but I am so pissed off at my dear husband that i can't help but wallow in my current mood. 

I love Christmas and decorating and having family in. I agreed to no tree this year per his wishes. i decided to do a little decorating with my Christmas tree collection and set out my grandmother's handpainted nativity scene done in ceramic. I love the story of Christmas, of Jesus's birth and the promises that come with it. If people don't feel the same way I do, that's fine. To each her own. My husband doesn't get why I'm so excited about Christmas.  I told him the above and he quieted down, but I know it's not the same for him. I can handle that. What I'm having trouble with right in this moment is that he moved things around from the back room to a closet and now I can't find one of the boxes that has a crystal tea light tree in a velvet bag. This is royally pissing me off because he has been moving things around to different places ever since he retired and I am sick and tired of it. 

Part of me wants to tear through the closet again and see if I can find it. That would be ok if my back wasn't so cranky today. He's napping on the couch and all I can think is that i want to wake him up and yell at him. This rage is kind of disproportionate to the situation. If I look back at my time in OA, I know that I am Hurt, Angry, Lonely and Tired. So it's time to get something to eat and maybe take a nap. 

Thanks for listening. Blessings abound

..appears to want to be written. I'm still working on avoiding sugar, though I've been a little looser with it in the last twenty four hours. After all, pumpkin is a vegetable, so pumpkin pie on it's own without whipped dream is ok. Except with the pie actually in the house I have found myself thinking about it and wanting it.  Pickles and cranberries jellied in cider seem to take the edge off that craving. 

I had a delicious pedicure today. My feet are so soft and smooth, the nails painted scarlett. I felt relaxed for the rest of the day. 

I found some beautiful garlic today at Foote Street Farmstand. Some of it will go in the ground for the winter. Erik wants to grow garlic this year and this will make his dream come true. We'll plant in tomorrow's chill air. There are rumors of sun on the horizon.

My children's paternal grandfather died in mid-October. His memorial service was today in Massachusetts. "Grammy" is still alive though she has been victim to a spell of ill health. Neither was at the wedding of Dylan and Becca in August. She will have her children and her grandchildren there. I've offered my sons comfort over the phone.  It feels like not enough, but they have other people in their lives to comfort them. I've thought of calling them tonight to see how they are. Grammy flew D&B in from Oregon for the service. It feels a little like when they'd be at their dad's and I would want to call them but did not want to infringe on their time together. So I send them hugs and kisses on the air and prayers for their comfort and well being. 

Blessings abound

Right in this moment, I love my life. Right in this moment everything works for me. A pinnacle that even as I write about it, I cannot stretch further than it is. 

Today is six marks without the concentrated sugar. It is becoming clearer to me that I am clearer without it. Clarity comes with times of discomfort as the emotions and intense feelings make me squirm. I'm starting to see that if I make it through those discomfiting times, the times of comfort and joy are clearer, longer and more frequent. I have lost twenty two pounds this year. This is no small accomplishment for a woman who has had steadily gained weight every year for the prior twenty.  About ten pounds a year has been my average gain. If I stay the course, this year reverses that trend. 

I have a better understanding of " Little by little, one goes far." The years pass whether I take action on my health or not. Little steps across the coals propelled me to this place where I am doing what I no longer believed to be possible. This is a very cool thing. It's really okay to focus on myself here and work the kinks out that have kept me as stuck as a stuck record with no one to jostle the needle back into the groove of my own record.  Little by little, I am reclaiming that part of me that was lost to sugar, lost to binging. I'm even playing with my art a little more. This is a very good thing. 

My hands have healed enough from my tendonitis that I am once more able to pick up yarn and needles and knit. I'm working on a denim blue pullover for myself. It is soothing to sit in front of the fire and knit. No sound in the house but the fire and the low hum of electricity. LoraBoraLabradora sits by my side, content in our togetherness. 

Right in this moment I realize how truly blessed I am.

Blessings abound.

Amanda spent the night last night and this morning we are drinking coffee and enjoying TV & Broadband while lounging in our matching LL Bean flannel nightgowns of ivory and blue. I like when Amanda comes to visit. She's doing law school an hour away from here. Every so often, she pops over, spends the night in the livingroom on the pull out couch and we watch movies, talk, hang out. This morning it is snowing outside, a thin snow that sticks but is insubstantial even as it clings to the ground.  The coffee is hot, the floor cold, the room dark and cozy. I am happy to be home and away from work. 

Blessings abound

Tonight I feel plenty full with all the good things in my life. The material things, the broadband, the World Series are fun and exciting to have. I realize how truly fortunate we are to be able to afford the technology that makes these things possible. 

I had dinner tonight with a very best friend and her very bestest, oldest friend. I am plenty full of the laughter we shared, the scatalogical humor having tickled my fancy. I am plenty full of Pauline's good food, her glistening ruby wine and the joy of seeing my friend happy to be with her friends. 

I am plenty full of the Hunter's Moon now on the wane. Autumn is in the air and on the morrow's weather agenda. The sun through the last of the leaves before the trees fully yield the view is savored and appreciated as the daylight grows shorter. The smell of fresh cow manure on fallow fields signals the farmer's quest to prepare for next year's planting. I am replete with the rushing waters of the river, songs of water over rocks and through tree branches drowned and chilling their fingers to the cambrium bone.

I am secure in the love of my dog and the man with whom I share my bed and my life. 

Tonight I revel in how truly blessed I am. 

Blessings abound

The day is grey, drizzly and soul suckingly flat. Erik is off in a little bit to a two day Disaster Planning workshop in Stowe with Ceredwyn.  I'm recovering from a blocked parotid gland. My mouth is really dry. Could not eating sugar in large quantities be contributing to this dryness, I wonder? I'm drinking plenty of fluids, but the right side of my jaw has a hard nubbin of a gland just below and in front of my ear. I've taken to eating sour pickles to get it to secrete. Plus, pickles don't make me fat. I don't think I've gained back the weight I lost, but I haven't hopped on the scale to see. Nor have I donned again the jeans that were unzippable.  Just very blah. I'll check my weight again at work this week.  In the meantime, my pants fit well and that's a good thing to appreciate. I'm throwing away the fat jeans with the worn out thigh so they're not an option for me to slide up into.

Erik being gone means I have to get my own coffee in the morning.  Poor,poor pitiful me. On the plus side, Loraboralabradora won't be relegated to sleeping in the kitchen. The dog will keep me safe.  Of late there have been a couple of murders about an hour away. The most recent one has seen the State Police doing information stops, passing out fliers, requesting information of anything suspicious or people who don't belong. Lock you doors and windows. The sorts of things we take for granted living in this beautiful place.  Things I really don't want to think about.

I have one of the massive roasting chickens we butchered with Ceredwyn and family thawing in the sink.  It's the size of a young turkey, breasts over developed so that the bird was in danger of tipping over the closer it came to slaughter time. I took it out yesterday to thaw.  I want to make chicken with black beans, tomatoes and chipotle salsa. I just want the breasts for this batch.  I'll use the remainder of the bird for something else as the week goes by. Waiting for it to thaw seems to be an interminable process. I am not very patient these days. I am impatient to feel better, impatient to leave work, impatient with the healing process.  I think I need a nap.

Actually, what I "need" is sugar. Simple carbohydrates, baked goods. Honey, maple syrup, brown sugar, organic sugar. All the sugars I don't eat anymore.  I've baked lots of apples. That helps for a while but then today comes along and I long for sweet.

Time to nap. Seriously.

For me to lose eleven pounds in four weeks, it is exciting and scary. I used to think that as I lost weight, as people noticed they would expect me to lose more weight. Today I have come to the conclusion that the person I most feared would expect me to lose more weight is me!  Because of how large I am, it takes a little more for the people with whom I come in contact to notice that I have lost. I wear baggy scrubs to work.  They hide a multitude of sins. Last week a size smaller scrub top showed the weight loss and I felt so exposed.  A part of me wants compliments- I like that attention, even as I fear I will disappoint myself.  I am excited about the difference in my body not eating concentrated sugars has made. I want to see my body change. Yesterday I tried on a pair of jeans I haven't been able to fit into in at least three years. They zipped!! Skin tight, but they ZIPPED!!!

I just asked Erik to go out to a dance with me next weekend. I feel as if I can move a little bit better. And dancing would be a good activity.  Today I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep up the good work I've done. As usual my Very Busy Brain got in the way and started chattering away about how much weight I must have gained by eating three or four biscuits last night. Bleu cheese biscuits to eat with the chicken soup Erik made.  I admit, I over ate them. I'm not at a stage where I can have stuff like that in the house and ignore it. Of course, the best way to avoid that would be for me not to make them in the first place. So today, no bread.

To keep My Very Busy Brain from sabotaging me, I went outside with Erik and we dug at what will be a new raised bed for next year's garden. He dug and I sifted through the miniature daffodil bulbs that were than replanted in other areas around the yard. There were enough bulbs to replant, to give away to the neighbors. Even enough to bring inside to the refrigerator. I'll keep them in the crisper drawer with the root vegetables. Sometime around Thanksgiving I will bring them out and force them so we can have flowers in bloom at Christmas.  A lovely abundance to have.  

We also were able to dig some potatoes that had volunteered from last year. I'll use them tonight when I make colcannon. I have some lovely red kale to contribute to that dish. We'll have some Swiss steak for dinner. I can measure out the colcannon in controlled portions. At least I think I can.

There is no trying, only doing. And if I lose a little more weight, I'll be able to wear the now zippable jeans...comfortably.

Blessings abound

  After starting the fire, we returned to the yurt on the hill. One of the exercises in preparation for the firewalk was to break an arrow, symbolizing that which one wanted to break through. I wanted to break through sugar and sorrow, breaking my way into joy. I assumed the Horse stance, a stance of power. Stephanie stood an arrow's breadth away from me, the feathered end of the arrow in the board in her hands. The board was painted with a symbol. The point of the arrow lightly pressed against my throat. Three times I took breath, bringing my arms like billows pumps up and down. With each pump of my arms, each drawing of breath, the community chanted the power word I had chosen. Joy!JOY!! JOY!!! With the third chant, the third downward thrust, the third expulsion of breath, I stepped forward, breaking through sorrow, breaking through sugar, surging into Joy and a hug in Stephanie's arms. Even as I stepped forward, my mind wondered at the arrow pressing into my neck, feeling as if this time it might not break, this time it might pierce the delicate tissue of my throat. My resolve held and the arrow broke, shattering my bond to sugar and the sorrow my binging brought me. Exultant, I harvested the arrow pieces from the floor and returned to my place in the circle.

Soon it was time to travel the trail back to the fire. The large pile of dense, cool wood had been reduced to a carpet of coals, glowing red in the moonlight. Banks of coals on either side flickered flames of blue and orange. We encircled the site, our wagons full of hope and intention for transformation, for healing. We started chanting, singing. The first pilgrim came to the head of the fire and stepped forward onto the carpet of coals.  There was no tentativeness, just an air of confidence as the walk was made from one end to another, full of purpose.

Soon enough came my turn. I made my way across the coals. I felt the kiss of the coals on the soles of my feet. The grass felt cool and refreshing on the otherside. The full moon lit the scene as the singing and walking continued. Each time across the coals burnished my intention to let go of sugar and sorrow, burnished my invitation to walk with joy in my life. I made the commitment to myself, one step at a time, one kiss on the feet of my sould.

It has been four weeks today since I last walked the coals. I have rid myself of concentrated sugar.  i have lost eleven pounds, seemingly without effort. There has been effort in getting through some of the times I would normally turn to sweets for comfort and the numbness they bring. I have walked further on this resolution than I have in a very long time. Today I am continuing to build upon the foundation I laid in the night on the flames at Spirit Hollow.