Penny

Penny
Sweet Puppy.... as long as she's sleeping

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Crap I Cannot Unlearn

I used to work at the same organization with this pretty amazing woman.  How amazing?  Well, not only is she insanely brilliant, witty, funny, and loves Jesus, but our first conversation involved frank descriptions of what happens to your body during pregnancy and I'm pretty sure the term "crotch rot" was used.  Our second conversation covered the dilemmas of wearing Spanx and a thong at the same time.  Mind you, all of this was via Office Communicator.  We didn't meet face-to-face until two months later.  Instant. Connection.

Once we bonded over the fact that we were both impossible to faze with bodily functions and had similar senses of humor, we began to email each other funny things we found on the web.  Thanks to her, I discovered TheBloggess via the now insanely famous Beyonce the Metal Chicken.  Once I wiped the tears from my eyes, I became a semi-devoted reader to this blog.  Student teaching made reading any blogs virtually impossible, but the graduating from school and subsequent unemployment has given me plenty of time to read all of the blogs on the interwebs, thus making me a daily reader of TheBloggess, who I find simply amazing in every possible way.

That being said, I was reading her blog the other day, and every week she has a weekly wrap up section, "shit i did when i wasn't here."  She is a contributor to several other websites, including this satirical sex column, sexis.  Usually I find the stuff on there tame and humorous.  It's actually safe for work, for the most part.  Except in one article, she listed about the top 10 strange things for January that readers had emailed her.  And number one blew.my.mind.  And made my soul cry a little bit because I can never go back to the moment before I clicked "play."  Brace yourself.... Are you aware.... That there is a world championship for masturbating?!!?! What the what?  Never in my 29 years would I have ever imagined that to be 'competition' material.  If you're brave enough to follow the link above, it's a YouTube interview with the current world champion.  You don't see anything really dirty, but you do have to confirm that you're over 18, 'cause that shit is serious, y'all.

I am pretty sure my jaw was on the floor the entire duration of this interview.  I cannot even go into details why, I will let the more adventurous ones of you go see for yourselves... Also, you adrenaline junkies out there, if you are brave enough to click on that link, check out the banana candle.  But be prepared to throw up in your mouth a little bit.

Now that I've scarred you for life, I do hope you'll come back around.  Next time I will post about something happy, I promise.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Yoga For Fat People

For the past few weeks, I've been feeling tense and achey.  Some days were better, some days were miserable - overall just icky.  This morning, I woke up feeling much better than I had over the weekend and decided to take some proactive measures to stop feeling so all around blah.  I've been wanting to get into yoga for a while now, so I searched Netflix, found some yoga work out videos, and set out to stretch my muscles and get in touch with my internal organs.

Now, I had no allusions that I would be gliding through poses with the greatest of ease.  I knew that it wouldn't be easy.  I took 2 warm yoga classes last year and I knew it was challenging, but I wasn't sure how much of the difficulty was attributed to the 98* room and how much was attributed to my own awkwardness.  I was pretty sure that I wouldn't end up on the bathroom floor, white as a ghost, clutching the toilet wondering when I would pass out (true story and basic summary of my first warm yoga experience), but I wasn't sure what to expect.

So, I rolled out my awesome green yoga mat, pushed play and did my best to go along with the moves.  For the most part, I did okay.  However, once you get into some of the moves, it is very difficult for a size 18 body to maneuver.  For example, please review this picture I snagged off of Google:
See her taut little body nicely folded in half?  Very easy when you don't have a gut in your way.  When this yogi does this pose, you can see whatever is behind her.  When my much more tubby body tries this, it is a sea of rolls, boobs, and squished blubber.  Having boobs doesn't make this any easier either.  They are just in the way.  If you have a belly pooch, like I do, any move that involves bending over or planking is just super hard.

I felt really good afterwards, despite being a little sad that I couldn't do all of the poses correctly.  I kept saying to myself "they need 'yoga for fat people' videos." So I decided to google it - there are a ton of pages about this and I found some helpful modifications.  Hopefully if will continue to get better!  I can only hope.

To be fair, it's not only my excess body fat that makes yoga hard.  I am a giant bag of medical issues.  First, I have a several fibroid tumors on my lower spine/pelvis, on my L4-L5 and my L5-S1.  Basically, right here:

This makes laying on my back uncomfortable at times, and during some of the poses I thought I was going to pass out.  It happened to be on each of the poses where she said "Feel all of the blood rushing through your spine".  Turns out my tumors don't like the blood rushing down there.  Ironically, I get the same feeling when I drink liquor.

Also, my neck is kinda messed up, which makes sitting up straight and elongating my spine kind of hurty.  See, a normal neck is supposed to be curvy, like the second picture below.  My neck is like the first picture below.  It's fixable, and I've seen a chiropractor about it once before, but I just haven't gone to the therapy for it yet.  It's on my "to-do" list.


So I will continue to try yoga, but I think I'm going to have to make some adaptions, supplement with cardio and hope that yoga gets easier as I lose weight.  It can only get better, right?!

Friday, January 20, 2012

Musings on Horrible TV

So I'm quite disgusted with myself right now.  I've watched about 70 minutes of various episodes of Sixteen and Pregnant.  I don't know why I'm not turning this off; it probably has something to do with the fact that there is nothing good on at this time of day.  These high schoolers are so... soo... I don't even have a word for what they are.  And this show frustrates me because I do feel like it somehow glorifies teen pregnancy.  But in watching these few episodes, I have a glimmer of hope that it serves as a method of birth control.  It is my sincerest hope that young girls watch this show that young teenage boys are assholes.  In almost every episode, they flake out on their significant other as soon as she pops out that baby.  They either peace out or don't take any responsibility.  They let their d-bag friends convince them that they should still "be a teenager" and party or play video games and shirk responsibility.  No, sir.  You need to man up and help out.  Especially in this episode where the father is NINETEEN.  Why are you nineteen, jobless, sleeping on your girlfriend's mom's couch.  Son.  Cut your Justin Beiber skater boi hair, stop smoking hooka, take the freaky-deaky hoops out of your lips, and get a job.  You're a father.  You've got a precious baby boy at home.  You need to support him and your sixteen year old girlfriend and stop leeching money from her parents.  ARGH.

I wish I could yell at these kids.  But since I can't, I'm yelling on my blog.  I am so angry, I think I'm just going to go clean something.

Friday, January 6, 2012

The First Time I.......

My super amazing friend, Emily Fazawesome, inspired this blog.  In fact, she's really quite inspiring period.  Seriously.  Check her out here to see the original inspiration for this "The First Time I...." post, and then you should head over to Long Distance Lobsters to see her current masterpiece that she updates daily along with her friend Zoe.  Seriously, right click, open in new tab, and read.  Now.  I'll wait........

Okay, now back to me.  This blog is all about the first time I..... *drumroll*.... refinished hardwood floors!

My husband and I are house hunting.  And by house hunting I meant my husband J-dubs (his selected blog nickname from here on out) looks at houses on Zillow each and every night and then decides we don't have enough money just yet to buy.  But we have gone to look at a few that really caught our interest.  One such house was this GORGEOUS tudor-style (my fave) house in a near-by neighborhood.  It was almost perfect, but we were concerned about some water damage to the roof and backed off a bit.  But it had lovely hardwood floors on the first floor.  We were driving home after touring this house and were talking about how much we loved the hardwood floors.  Now, we've known for a while that our entire house has original hardwood under the dull tan carpet.  We were also planning to re-carpet the house once we sold or rented, due to some stains left over form when we were housebreaking Penny.  The question is posed: What condition do you think that hard wood is in?  I said "Well, let's find out!"  My darling husband replied "When?"  to which I replied "I don't have any plans today!"

So, we came home, moved some furniture around, and proceeded to rip up all the carpeting in the living room.  And the hardwood floors in this part of the house were in really great condition.  That night I ran out to a bachelorette party, which led to me spending the night at the bride-to-be's house.  I arrived home the next morning to find J-dubs standing in the middle of the living room with a random orbital sander.  Apparently, we were ready to go. 

So, we sanded and sanded and sanded the floors, then wiped everything down with Mineral Spirits, and around 10 PM we started staining.  We choose a darker color, Red Mahogany.  J-dubs didn't trust me with  the staining part, so he would brush on the stain and I followed behind to mop it up.  We waited the requisite time between coats and then laid down poly.  The first coat of poly went on around midnight.  Then he had to get up at 3 am to lay down the second.  Yes.  Three.  In the morning.  It was insane.  But our floors looked amazing.

The only problem was that we couldn't walk on it for something like 48 hours.  We ended up boarding Penny for a night, and then I took Penny to my parents for several days so we would not be banished to one room.  Also, for that entire day that Penny was boarded, I had to enter and exit via the window in my room because of the lay-out of our house.  But it was so worth it.  I am still shocked some days when I come into the living room.  It was a very hard task and there are several areas we smudged a bit, but overall it is wonderful and I'm so proud of us for our diy project. :)

Below are some pictures of our ordeal!  I have a few more to add, but I have to get them off of his phone... mine died during the documentation of the sanding and staining:

Ripping up the existing carpet

It's in good condition!

Staining the floors

Difference in colors.

Putting down the poly!

My only way into and out of the house for a few days.