06-13-17 Using Those *SUPER* Skills!
By Aynetal3
@aynetal3
SORRY SORRY… THIS is better!
Tuesday, June 13, 2017 @ 5:58AM Good morning. This is just us … hey, do you ever expect anyone else? Just wondering. It’s ok … you weren’t wrong. We’ll let it go 😉 So, here we are at a brand-new day. What’s in store, Lord only knows. I’d like to think optimistically. It took us about 20-25 minutes to get to the writing, AND we’re not doing all the old things we used to do – well, at least some of them. We did glance at emails and open a few, but there are about 218 gathering there. Yesterday, I still couldn’t get to them and I certainly didn’t do them over the quilting weekend. That would have taken too much something, we don’t have.Today, is the day we get Austin for a visit. We are so looking forward to seeing that kid! He’s likely to have grown in so many ways! I don’t want to get too much into that, but we are picking him up after Dr. Marvin’s about 3-3:30PM. Rich is driving with me today, and we should leave a half-hour early, because he needs to stop at the bank. Maybe, we’ll leave just 15 minutes? Hmm, maybe he knows, he must stop for gas too. I think he was home most of yesterday except grocery shopping. It would have been more likely he stopped for gas yesterday instead though because he gets his gas at Walmart. We’ll see. Those fifteen extra minutes? We’re going to live dangerously!Rich and us looked at movies yesterday that we might see, but we’d have to go tonight and we don’t know what’s on Austin’s mind. We only have him until Thursday, and Rich is going to be playing poker Wednesday night. I sure hope that will be OK with Austin. I didn’t even think of that before. Ok, ALSO letting that go.I think we’ll be talking to Dr. Marvin about the quilting, but what else? We did make a few calls yesterday, but just things we were supposed to. We called Austin for a last time check and food/drink check, we called our dentist, the diabetic shoe guy, our financial guy, and our remodeling guy, oh and our nurse. Plus, we canceled Dr. Marvin on Thursday and gym on Wednesday. Dr. Marvin had a glitch in his schedule anyway, but it is going to be the first day we missed gym. We made sure to tell people. I don’t want them to think that we wouldn’t be there out of disinterest. We REALLY are interested hehe. This morning for a minute, we checked a few body parts and we’re thinking – hmm, maybe those aren’t quite as big any more, but STILL PLENTY of room to go. I think if there is time, we are going to ask Amie to check our measurements tomorrow. She is the one that is confident that we are already turning some of our fat into muscle. I don’t think it happens that quickly, but we’d be up for a nice surprise. She did the measurements the first time too. Then maybe we could get her one last time before she goes. I’m pretty sure that after mid-July, she will be done. I would miss her a lot, but understand she probably has a lot sicker patients. She has done a terrific amount in helping us stabilize new diet plans. She’s been with us back about three months. Probably nearing the three-month anniversary – this is the good stuff.AHA! I think fuzzy-face is getting up. I hear some movement. He’s about 15 minutes late for work! He is pretty good at waking up the first time the chime rings at 6AM. I NEVER hear it from the bedroom, but he’s much more regular … hold-on about time we turn around and wait for him. *Sigh* back. We like to smooch him good first thing in the morning. He’s not so much for our playfulness though so we must dial it back a bit. Hehe, he had to go back for his glasses, so we got him for an extra round of hugs coming back through our hug machine. Good job ladies! He squeaked out an “I Love you,” for which we marveled. It was only moments later, but he said he was up much more now. Good moods all around!AHA! BACK! 7:29AM 😊We were gone for about an hour. We followed Rich to the sitting room and talked and talked – BOTH of us! And, then a half hour later, we fed Dakota, took our medicine, made the Jell-O and ate our breakfast with Rich. It was schmooze nice! Oh, and there was a lot of petting for Dakota in-between things. He’s such a silly puppy. We had some very good conversations. The bulk of it was talking about losing weight. Rich decided that Amie was on top of it in saying that you gain some weight with building muscles, and he had no doubt that we were already gaining muscles. We’re not feeling that yet, but we’ll maybe ask Dr. Marvin about it. Are we specifically … gaining muscles yet after about two weeks at the gym? We are trying to pay attention and you heard earlier, we’re going to ask Amie about measuring. We’re a little afraid at this point, which is maybe why we keep going back to it. We just REALLY want to see a difference. We gained another .4 lbs. this morning. We are hovering JUST below 270, with 267 being our tough numbers to break. A good amount of Rich’s losing weight talk was on plateaus, and we figure we are on a doozy. We told you after gastric bypass, we got down to this same 267 and we couldn’t bust it. Rich said something about staying on the same numbers for a month. OH LORD! That be terrible! But, if that is the case. Might as well start a new countdown. Let me go back and figure it out. OK – GOT IT! We are now on our SIXTH day of being over 267, since hitting it on the 5th. Hmm … 13 – 5 = 8 days … whimpering … recounting – oh, it was the 7th since hitting 267, so minus 6 days - … 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th& 13th. Yup-yup … the math works. WOW! Are we lousy counters! But, if it takes about a month – we’re on day #6. That will teach our goofy body, we’re just going to make a DIFFERENT game out of it – GOT YOU FOOL! Hehe. Sorry, no intention to insult. GOT YOU BUNNY-FACE *Giggling now*Ok, we can be then merrily on our way. We better check the schedule again … we must leave at 10:30AM and not 11AM, so what gets cut? Ahh, email/Evernote time after our shower. So, that is what gets cut. I’d be so happy to at least get rid of the first level junk emails. I’d started that before, but hit the wrong key, and then we lost all our deletions, and we didn’t have the time or tenacity to go back from the start. Probably today is considered the next probably time to fix that.Let’s think about yesterday for a few moments. We do have to wrap it up in an hour and fifteen minutes. This kind of time goes by in a flash! I LOVE that we get to be more productive. OK, let’s start with that. Do you know that yesterday, we slept with our C-Pap and did good, then wrote about eight pages in our blog, and then went to the gym, got stuff done, talked to Linda for just over an hour, had smooch-face time with our friend, did ALMOST TWO hours of quilting, AND went to bed on time after massaging said smooch-face hehe? Oh Lordy, when did all that kind of gooey goodness start? That was a LOT of VERY nice things to be happening.As to the C-Pap, I think we’re averaging about seven hours a night, and that has happened over the last five days. OH MY! Is that all? It feels like forever. I think this is going to be a good blend! I am still falling asleep or coming close to it during the time right after dinner, and yesterday, we still had an hour nap after gym. BUT, we’re going to say that gym is kicking our but, rather than we weren’t sleeping well the night before. Another nice thing happening with the C-Pap? Rich has been able to stay in bed with us all night, for two nights in a row. He says there are probably other things happening, I forget what, but we’re thinking it is awfully coincidental. I know he was tired from fishing. We went over that argument in saying he’s been fishing before. SOOOO, instead of sleeping LESS with us, he seems to be sleeping more. I think the steady hum of the air is more comforting than our distorting snores. YAY, score another point!We’ve also gotten past the part that we are afraid of frightening the pieces out of him. It helped last night when about 9:30PM, he asked if we wanted to go in before bed time (10PM) and get some snuggling in. We both agreed that watching a little TV would be good. He said this morning, we made it for about nine minutes. He then had to put us to sleep official AND with the mask, but we didn’t fight him on it. We were very dutiful. YAY US! Do you think we are the ones that capitalize a lot?The blog writing has been EXCELLENT! Other than the weekend when we were out of town, everything seems so perfect with being able to write steady again. I think this is the part we write home about. We haven’t talked to Dr. Marvin much about it, so maybe that will come up today. I’m not sure what else there is to say about this. Hmm, let me think. The first thought was that I don’t know when over the last ten years since Rich has lived with me that we’ve felt this solid about our core writing. I am sure that we’ve written more daily at some point during all those ten years, but the part I remember the most was writing like this before he came to live with us. I suppose, we might try a small check? That might take too much time. Let me see if I can do it in just a few moments. It looks like this blog only started in 2010 … I remember now – it was the time we had written our book. We were sketchy and missing some months. 2013 seems the best, and even at that, we were writing four to seventeen times a month. After that, we were writing only up to 34 times for the year. Let’s see if we can get to before that. Ok, we found that blog – it’s the same as this last, but there were 1200 entries and it went back to November of 2005, that is when we came over from AOL Journals. It looks like the months were solid, in that we were at least writing each month. Hmm, and then it gets too hard. The roll on the side doesn’t list by years, only month, year and then we’d have to open up each month, and we wouldn’t even get a count during the month, we’d just get the feed to the left, and we’d have to follow each story to see what dates they were being labeled. AND, we’re not going to do all that. BUT, suffice it to say, that at least from 2005 through 2010, we were at least writing every month. Not sure about every day. BUT, it would be easy to then say, that over the last SEVEN years from 2010 to 2017, we have NOT been writing faithfully on a near every day experience.I think after Rich moved in, the C-Pap machine went, and so did the daily writing. There was just too much to do because I’m sure we preferred talking to him, and we no longer went to bed early so we could get-up and write. SO, with this BIG weight lost at the hard to reach 267 lbs., this window has opened-up. We are finally, back to regularity in the writing that has not happened for a VERY long time, BUT, we’re now doing it again, and that fact should be celebrated! For sure, it will at least rate high in the Dr. Marvin book!Funny, we just read an excerpt from the old blog on the screen we had been scrolling in looking up that other information. It stated, “Dr. Woollcott used to say that we can go so far and then there’s a relapse or are doing fine and then give up the ship.” We’re going to shut down that blog, because we don’t want to go back into yesteryear, but for the sake of record, this excerpt came from June 10th, 2010 at 11:18 AM. This goes to show you, that until you resolve your issues, things reappear over, and over until you REALLY get past something. At the time, we were discussing weight issues and issues with my sister’s medical as being overly problematic. Neither, of these issues have stopped. That’s kind of depressing. Let’s make tht another Dr. Marvin set of issues to go over. OK?Let’s move on.Next, is going to the gym – what thoughts have you? Hmm, first, we had Laura, the hard teacher, but by now we’re saying we had Laura the more professional teacher. We like her more day by day. She still has trouble sharing things that are lighter, or at least further from her, like she now admits it might be good for us as a group to talk a few minutes between us before she comes in. She likes to be though 100% in charge during the full sixty minutes of the course. WHICH, of course, makes her good at her job as to getting us to be moving. She’s especially happy when we’ve all turned that corner and are moving in sync following all her movements. I do like that part. AND, we should say here, she leads the group in the swimming area right before our class, and she probably has them in sync too! I think one or two of our group, is in her other group, but I would have absolutely NO idea how they could carry on that kind of energy!We did talk a few moments to the other members and we got far enough to mention how we did over the weekend. We mentioned our quilting, and they both mentioned how hot it was, and that, they both stayed inside. We only had three people – Pat, Nancy and us. That is a fine group, but now Jodi has us worrying about them canceling class. It is clear she doesn’t want to be giving up her private time she could be on her 1-to-1’s, to be with us. That kind of irks me and we’re not sure what to do other than to talk to Dr. Marvin. I don’t want to shake the boat at the Y, because it seems like teachers and rooms are in short supply. I think things slow down after the summer, but we’ve got a LONG way to go, before then. So, should stay in line.One thing though with Laura. During some part of her routine, we told her about (out loud with the group present) that we met with the other quilters, and that I had shown them Laura’s movement when we finished group … It is where we pull both arms out past our side – toward as far as we can stretch, and she says breath in, breath out, and then she indicates that we’ve completed the work and that we did a good job. I told her that now the quilters have started doing the movement as they finish quilting something. It has become a cherished expression all around, and my way of sharing one group with the other. She didn’t say much at first, maybe didn’t know what to do with that, but then later, she indicted a clear and present smile while doing it at the end of the day, and we could tell she was remembering fondly to our story. YAY! She does have some shareable space, AND if we don’t say anything the rest of the term, we said something important here. Otherwise, barely any talking as we work in gym.We’ve only got 25-minutes left, so we are choosing next to talk about the quilting. 25-minutes goes by FAST while writing! Oh, that’s one thing we remembered while using the restroom just a little bit ago. We remembered the feeling of being timed while we wrote. We are trying to start and stop on our schedule, so that for example, when we come back from our shower, and we still have just over an hour before leaving to Dr. Marvin’s, that we don’t continue our writing instead of doing something else. In the old day, we had to stop writing – on the clock, because we had to take our shower and go to work. We remember plenty of times not showering, because we couldn’t lose the writing time, or times we stayed home, because, we just had so much to write about. We don’t want to do that now. Not for the same reasons, but because we’ve been trying over these last three months to do self-discipline. It all starts back to the term “self-regulation,” but we don’t want to do that now straight away, it’s all just another feeling from the old days that we are battling with this plateau. I’m sure there will be other memories that come back, but as to now? Quilting!Let’s see where to start. I guess the first thing would be is that not only did we have an excellent quilting weekend which we are now pretty done with talking about, well, we have also now had two days of quilting where sometime between 7-9PM we have been in the sewing room. Some a little before and some a little after, but we are doing what it takes to restart the new routine. We have to turn on all our lights, and we’re remembering how we used to have a light over the ironing board, which we might need back again. That light might be in the guest room? We have two of the four lights in the living room, one in Rich’s office, and the other? Let me look quick.AHA! It is in the guest room. Thought so! We will move it back to the sewing room probably tonight. There IS a lot of clutter in that corner of the sewing room- behind the ironing table and seeping out all around. I don’t have time to do it right now, but maybe this weekend when Rich goes fishing again. Shoot, forgot Austin is coming. Might not get to quilting tonight – just depends on how talkative Austin is. He may talk, or he may need some quiet computer time. We’ll see, and we’ll be open.Ok, so that’s one thing solved. The next thing is that we found the tall fan, and that still works well, and I’m not going to give that up over the summer! It’s the biggest fan in the house, but back when we were sewing before – MAYBE all the way back to 2013, we used to spend a lot of time in the sewing room and it was purchased by me for that reason. So, we’re glad to have the fan restored.Shoot, time is moving too fast. We’ll have to maybe start with sewing tomorrow morning. BUT, let me say this much. I am LOVING IT! Absolutely!We are working on my grandmother’s blanket, and I know someone told you about that a day or so ago. BUT, we finished the second quilt yesterday, and we did the first finish on Monday. Pswhoo! We’re doing great. We do get to a part of finishing, where we come out with the product to do a “show” for Rich. He is gracious enough to turn off the TV and allow me to put on the light, and then we tell him whatever ever is on our mind about it. So, we have that little piece of happiness too.But, I think more than anything there is this pleasantness, when the machine is humming just right, and your sliding the fabric under the needle, and the corners are slipping into place – locked, and that is all perfect. There’s another part where you are matching corners to be sewn, or when you hold your rows together, and realize that all is well and they are going to run in perfect diagonals. Even pressing seams so they all lay sharply in one direction or the other. Man! It is ALL good! It’s hard to explain much more than that. I don’t know what keeps all quilters that have devoted themselves to quilting into it. It’s the whole process, I’m guessing. There are so many “feel good” moments. There’s another series like when you are talking to other quilters – now either the up north folks, or the gym folks, but more than that is the beauty of these quiet times – with or without TV/Music, but the times, you are by yourself and everything is humming under your command and wisdom.Yup-yup did we just add the word “wisdom?” I think that’s right. Good call ladies! Quilting does take some wisdom. We get that from a lot of practice, so I’m thinking there are a WHOLE lot of ladies MUCH more experienced or wiser than us. We’re not going to contradict that, it’s just that we’ve developed some wisdom too. Maybe we’ll get back to understanding it enough so that we’re working on other things, beside simple blocked baby quilts, but for now our mind is on a “slow and easy” ride, and it is SOOO pleasant!Maybe we’ll learn to take you with it as we bridge our two biggies, writing and quilting. I think no one understands those values better than Dr. Marvin, AND we get to talk to Dr. Marvin today in just a short while, and maybe all we will do is gush over that! Hehe, probably not … we must do some of the hard work too, which includes diet and exercise. I think we’ll go over some CS stuff and quilt weekend too, but we’re not wanting to labor over all that. It had gone well, right? We might hear something back from Linda, because she talked to the twins last night too after their sewing group, but if we hear nothing back. We’ll probably tuck that even in our heart and move on hehe.Tonight! We get Austin here and while we HOPE while he’s here we can show him part of us which has become not so tired at night that we fall asleep before our quilting. It’s good for him to have these images of us. Also, the image of us talking, but we’re SURE there’s going to be some absolutely, if I may, FABULOUS talking on the way home! Ok, 9AM we got to go. Hey, do you remember the times, we used to count words? Let’s try that again. HehePage 9 of 9 3943 words 😊 Hey, there’s the chimes! Later!!