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edited to add: comments will still reach me

6/27/07 11:30 pm

Why do I persist in trying to go online during thunderstorms? This time I typed the post in word and pasted—hope the formatting doesn’t get funky.

I know, I know, classic hubris: I was just being so pleased with how this blog was getting maybe 5 hits a day, and then the main blog got a very nice uptick in hits because of Jenny’s link (I’m so glad you noticed the feral ponies in that post! Their ancestors were originally circus ponies and they were released on Rodgers’ Mountain in the 30’s. The same state park is famed for its azaleas, but you have to go much further along to encounter the ponies. Ilsa was out of her mind when we met them, but I was determined not to carry the carrots I’d brought for them one more day, so I made her tough it out).

One of those people just didn’t play by the rules. Jenny, I hope it wasn’t someone you know—understand, I only know what s/he did via my statcounter, and s/he may be so blog-naive as to think s/he was invisible clicking around, but it made me realize I need to go to a password.

Leah and Phantom, you both gave me suggestions—vox and wordpress, which allow feeds on private blogs. It looks like wordpress (like blogger) will let anyone with one of their accounts read a private blog, which means that they’re NOT private at all are they? Am I right about this?

I tried to sign up for vox—I mean, I did sign up, but didn’t get much past that. This computer is too ancient (at less than five years old) and way too many links were non-functional in the version of Safari that I’m using. I’ll have to download Firefox, which I’ve had trouble doing in the past and definitely can’t do during a thunderstorm. Or I may need to find a host site that’s not geared so exclusively to people with the wherewithal to keep up with all the latest toys. It may not happen before I go, but I’ll be switching this blog to somewhere else soon—don’t worry, Leah, I’m not planning on jumping ship altogether—Rhymes with J. will stay on blogspot for the foreseeable future, anyway.

So, today’s food:

builder’s bar
milk
iced tea
co-op sandwich: festival of soy (vegetarian hoagie)
limeade drunk from Z.’s teaset
water
seltzer
black raspberries
potato salad (includes green beans and cannelini)
fresh mozzarella
the first good tomato of the season
more black raspberries
strawberries
seltzer

Uncle Donor came over and we went to a free concert in a park not too far from here. I think it’s the first time that he and I have gone out in public with Z.—we were each holding one of her hands while we walked from the car to the concert—and there is no doubt that every feature she has that doesn’t look like me can be explained by a quick glance at him. Maybe not her ears. But really, everything else.

Exercise—last night I actually got a little walking in on the way to and from the party, which was three blocks from our house, so six blocks total. Today we maybe walked a comparable amount from the car to the free concert. But this is not enough and I need to get my schedule organized but it has so far been really really hard to have anything like a predictable day with A. and Z. Last week A. didn’t get out of school til Thursday, squeezed in a hair cut that meant I had to take Z. mid-day, and then she left for the Berkshires late Friday morning.

This week has been better, I guess, but there have still dinner and lunchtime commitments and A. handed Z. off to me in the middle of the day today, and we’re leaving town on Friday, which is the day after TOMORROW and the laundry is in disarray—there is a machine there, but it’s embarrassing to show up at one’s mother’s house with dirty laundry. It’s so freshman year, you know? At least once we’re there there will be a pool in Maryland and everything we’ve planned for the rest of the week involves plenty of walking.

But that doesn’t solve the problem of exercise here. I’ll only move my body if it’s part of a routine, built into the rhythm of my day. I’ve only gone to our pool once since it opened a month ago. I need to do better than that.

Hey You from H@zen and S@wyer

I'm happy to have you reading the main blog but I don't know you and I know you've read the no-lurking rules for the annex so please follow them and don't come back til I know who the hell you are.

6/26/07 10 pm

Today--201 (no, I don't think I actually lost another pound since yesterday, since that would mean burning 3500 calories over what I ate, or whatever the exact number is; I'm just reporting what the scale said because it made me happy. I never thought weighing 201 pounds would make me happy.)

builders bar, milk
iced tea
Gazpacho, tortilla chips, and some fresh mozzarella for lunch (leftovers)
2 squares of Green and Black Maya Gold (first chocolate in more than a month and it didn't make me binge on the rest of the bar.)
seltzer
Snack--can't remember what. Cheese puffs and something else.
water and then some more water--it was hot!
A plate of Mt. A!ry potluck for dinner. This is the thing of a private blog (and, Phantom, yes, it's working at least insofar as anyone lurking is doing so very discreetly): I know you'll know the kind of thing I mean. I went for seconds on the artichoke dip in the brown-bread bowl but didn't finish the fruit-yogurt soup. The sprouted-grain salad was particularly fine. The whole wheat pasta salad was a little on the near side of al dente.
A brownie. A. made peach brown betty but it went so fast I didn't get a shot at it.
A Coke--which maybe was a mistake, except I'm the only one in my household who's not crankola at this moment, so you know, maybe it wasn't.

We were at a sheva berachot dinner for the bride and groom. It was more fun than the wedding or the aufruf--a better scale for hanging out, no one whose face I didn't know, A. was there so I wasn't toddler-wrangling the whole time, and there was good singing.

The coincidence of the two weddings was that they had the same song for the processional--a Shef@ Gold song that A. chose for the wedding in the Berkshires, since she led that processional. And coincidentally, the Philadelphia couple also chose it, and they arrived at the potluck when we did, and someone started singing it, so we entered to the song.

Our host for the potluck said a few words--now, we're indirectly responsible for this couple because they met while the bride was visiting California to work on A. and my chuppah--and in his remarks the host revealed that he and the bride became friends because of a stray comment he made at Z.'s baby-naming. So this was a weekend where the Rhyming Family played this kind of role of being toasted for connections we made not just accidentally but more or less completely without knowing it. It was a useful and happy thing to be reminded of as I'm making my way out of my cave.

So, okay, the sheva berachot are the seven blessings said at a wedding and in the grace after meals in the week after the wedding. Because Z. needed to go home, we only heard them under the chuppah but b/c of the way the couple structured their ceremony, with friends coming up to comment on each blessing (did I mention that from signing the ketubbah to the end of the ceremony was TWO HOURS!?) there was no momentum to them under the chuppah, and I missed them at the wedding meal itself, so I really wanted to stay for them tonight. A. was pretty pooped, but she indulged me, and it was good. The sixth of the seven blessings contains two songs where, in a group of guests that's Jewishly-literate enough (according to A. the guests in the Berkshires did not reach critical mass on this point), the entire gathering will join in and when they're singing it for you it can actually make you dizzy. Not like my own anniversary is next week or anything.

When I first was going to Hillel, when I was converting, grace after meals intimidated me--there's this whole Hillel thing of doing it as fast as possible, and there's a whole intricate thing of which blessings are substituted for which occasions, and I would always get lost. We hardly ever do it at home--we substitute one of several much shorter blessings on shabbat, which is the only time we evver *do* bentsch (=say the blessing after meals), but over the years I've done it often enough that I don't get tripped up much and it is sung with great gusto so it's fun to do it once in awhile. It was fun to do it tonight. It was fun to do it with people I know. It was a social evening, and it was fun, and I went home singing, and when was the last time that was true?

Also, and this is a thing that ties into Helen, and to Z., the bride's stepfather, who is Arthur W@skow if that means anything to you, did the fifth blessing to the tune of "Morning Has Broken" and Cat Stevens was what I listened to on A.'s discman for a long long time in my initial weeks of pumping for Z. (when she was in the hospital and then later in the next few weeks when the blanching and the nipple confusion were so severe that I couldn't have her at my breast). I had that cd with me when I drove up to New York on the Sunday after Helen died and on my way back down I kept hitting replay over and over and over again on a couple of them, that one in particular. There are a handful of other songs I've used that way, to draw something out of me like a poultice. Big Yellow Taxi is one, during some of the particularly bad and drama-prone patches in Adams House my junior year. Naive Melody/This Must Be The Place is another, when my mother had surgery and when Smartest Dog died. So Arthur hit something home there.

(Thunder coming, blogging could get iffy. The grid in these parts is a little shaky and prone to brownouts and blackouts.)

But anyhow, I think that this wedding could well be the impetus I need to get back into the social swing of things. I know that I'm about to be out of town for two weekends in a row, possibly three, and then Harry Potter, so it's not exactly like I'm about to commit to getting to shul on time for another month or more, but, you know, not a bad evening.

6/25/07 8:45pm

builder's bar
water
iced tea
bagel with cream cheese (yeah)
seltzer
gazpacho
multi-grain baguette
cheese
builder's bar
milk

202--5 pounds down.

Therapy was not so exhausting this week. Exercise--6 blocks of walking to car, weeding later on. Still not figuring out how to move enough in the summer schedule. Carrying the boo, while demanding, is not aerobic.

I am once again so underslept that after the reorder was prepared I did nothing but stare into the computer all day long, and not in a professionally productive way. My old flame turned up at work and I confess that today all I wanted was for her to go back to California.

She! Never! Calls! First!!!!

At least A. is home so bedtime should get back to normal.

6/24/07 10 pm

Day o' eating out:

cafe for breakfast: cheddar and apple crepe, green tea--too rich for me actually
lunch--what's lunch? I had some crudites and hors d'oeuvres and other things in French (no, actually, those were all the things in French--really if I tried I could probably get blogger to do the diacritical marks, but it sort of smacks of editing, something I'm loathe to do in the annex) at the 20 minutes of wedding reception I attended before taking Z. home.
diner for dinner--mozz. sticks and omelette with cheese, spinach, tomato, and wheat toast on the side
ice cream, but it wasn't worth finishing--that'll teach me to opt for soft serve as a grown-up

And I messed up Z.'s bedtime ritual such that she worked herself up into a fever pitch of misery around a bath that she simultaneously wanted to have and refused to have until I took the choice of having it away, at which point she firmly decided that a bath was what she needed. I held firm, but my god it hurts to be called mama by a child who's crazed with tears.

A. comes home tonight, thank god.

6/23/07 11:20 pm

hoo boy.

I think I'm sticking to menu reporting right now--though I will say that I did manage to put together a shabbat dinner yesterday night at which we FORGOT to bless the challah. It was as if it was not on the table. And I forgot to bless my kid, too. It will be good when A. comes home.

Today, what we mostly ate was challah-based snacks. Toast w/cream cheese and cinnamon sugar for breakfast, a peach for me, an apricot for Z. Lunch was something or other--oh, leftover ravioli for me; Z. ate the rest of the extensive snack leftover from shul (really, I had packed her a full lunch: almonds, goldfish crackers, apricot, string cheese, water). We had lots of limeade. We slept for 3 1/2 hours. Both of us. And I'm still tired, because I sabotaged my bedtime last night. Z. had almonds and honey bunnies for snack when she woke up. For dinner, we had peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches with milk, apples, and cheese, because there was nothing in the pantry to cook because I didn't make it to the co-op yesterday. For some reason Z. is resistant to bread, so she opened up the sandwich to get at the honey, made toothmarks in the apple, and feasted on smoked gouda. Ice cream for dessert.

There was fruit at the wedding event we went to in the evening. Which was past Z.'s bedtime and I was, err, ambitious and guilt-ridden to even try it. (The bride is someone who I used to be much closer to and most of the initial fault for our drift is mine.)

Umm. Yeah. Right. That was buried in there. I went to shul this morning. Because of the aufruf (=bride and groom are called to the torah, everyone throws candy). It was the first time other than Z.'s birthday that I didn't leave in tears since I can't remember when, but it was also more of a party than really services. A low-davenning day. And the bride's stepfather, a Nationally Prominent Rabbi, did this thing of after each aliyah he interpreted the portion in English, which was LONG. I spent almost the entire time on the playground, anyway, and it was jumping. We had San Francisco weather today--no humidity, 70's, balmy--and there are no kids' services for the summer, so the playground minyan was the place to be.

6/21/07 9 pm

Solstice.

Also, for those of you who keep track of obscure sub-cultural holidays, among long-distance hikers it was World Hike Naked Day, a day which I failed to observe during my abortive 1998 thru-hike only because my hiking partner had wound up behind me a few days earlier. I taunted him in the shelter logs for a couple of days until he pulled a 30-mile day to catch up and in the process messed up his toes pretty badly. So I owed him some time off the trail.

I'm thinking of the hike a lot these days because this is the first time since then I've really lived with hunger. (During my pregnancy, it was more nausea than hunger until I put myself on the Brewer diet.) On the hike, I had to train myself to eat long before I felt that skritchy physical sensation of hunger because I had such a calorie deficit and was demanding so much of my body that if hunger set in I could have a really hard time, and I was alone much of the day, on mountains. Also, I was keeping up with men--many of them 4 or 5 years younger--who hiked the same distance in much less time, which meant I was really not resting as much as was maybe ideal. So I trained myself to notice early signs of blood sugar flagging and eat then.

In the initial week or two of hiking, I actually didn't have the stomach capacity. I'd gone to a nutritionist and read a slew of stuff and measured out each meal into ziploc bags and I would find that I literally had no room for them. I remember these two 18 year old kids, who were hiking about 300 miles for a senior project, egging me on to finish a pot of Lipton instant rice dinner. I had to eat so many candy bars a day it actually made me sick of sugar--among cheap commercial candy, Mounds and Almond Joy have some of the highest fat-to-sugar ratios out there, if you're ever find yourself interested in this sort of thing. I still relied on stops in the little towns along the route to address the calorie deficit. When thru-hikers come to town, it's pretty normal to start with a pint of Ben and Jerry's as a snack, move on to a pizza and then go looking for your next meal an hour later. I ate like this for three months and lost five pounds, which included all of my upper-body fat.

It won't surprise you that unless they keep doing something else pretty highly active (my hiking partner now does long-distance bike races), former thru-hikers are generally overweight. Once you've starved, it's hard to not be a little weird about food, even if no trauma is involved in the starvation. I now weigh more than 70 pounds over what I weighed at the end of my hike. Before the hike, I weighed the same amount at 27 that I weighed at 17.

So now I'm reacquainting myself with feeling hungry, not just between-meals hungry, but actually losing-fat hungry. It's sort of interesting. It's like I used to stop at a certain point on the way to hungry, and now I stop a little further down that path. And I learning to notice that I'm satisfied at an earlier point, too. I don't need to feel full, I just need to feel not-hungry. It's an intensive re-education about occupying my body.

6/21/07 1 am

Okay, this is what I said I wasn't doing anymore, the up at 1 am thing, but I have a book to read for tomorrow that I more or less forgot about until this evening. And there are NO alarms set in our house at all--except, you know, the internal one in Annoying Dog's head.

Summer is here.

203--total of 4 pounds off in 3 weeks.

Today:

Builder's bar
milk
peach
chips, avocado, and salsa
water
seltzer
fresh mozz., basil (from the garden!), tomato w/olive oil on multi-grain baguette
more seltzer

Exercise: just puddle-jumping and carrying the 28-pound boo for a couple of hours.

Puddle-jumping

This started out on the main blog and then I realized I don't need my mother to read it. So here you are.

Today was my last weekday home alone with Z. until next school year. A. is going out of town this weekend to catch up on all the gossip with Lo for one wedding while Z. and I stay here for a different one, but that won't be quite the same. And it won't be an attempt to combine some level of store presence with some level of parenting. Until sometime after Z.'s second birthday, Z. was staying home a lot, often two days a week. She would be sick or just cranky, I would weigh her age and my reluctance, and she would stay home. She got some extra sleep that way and I think she probably did need the extra mama time when she was still in the immediate months after her fall, but it also gave me a good excuse to hide from the store and it meant she had no reliable schedule and didn't really know if she would be going to school when she woke up in the mornings. By the time her second birthday rolled around the disadvantages were ascendant. I got tougher, things got better, she quickly became less inclined to tantrum in the morning. All good.

Then school let out for Z. before it did for A. My mother came to take Z. for the first two days of vacation, and Z. was cranky and wild, at least when I was around. She was so excited about her GranGran being here and worried about her GranGran going home again that she made herself sort of miserable.

Today it was just us, again, for the first time in actually quite awhile. By the end of the day, when we'd been to the store twice, she was pretty fried and so was I, but the morning started out better than the past two days. We were up early, as we have been the past couple of weeks--can I just say that the last week of school, I got Z. there in time for Boker Tov EVERY SINGLE MORNING?--and we had our breakfast but we stayed in t-shirt and a diaper because why not? We read books and did aquadoodle, and played with letters while mama read (oh! duh! Phantom, I just realized the significance of BB reading the eye chart--when you live with these little prodigies they seem so normal!) It was raining hard til around 10:30 or so, then turned into a perfect day. We thought we would go puddle-jumping.

I don't think Z. has puddle-jumped before, but she latched onto the idea. She believed it would require her raincoat and her boots, but when the boots didn't turn up she was perfectly willing to substitute her sandals, and for me to carry her raincoat. See, flexibility? She carried her nobbly-wobbly--these were a big thing last year in the kid- and dog-toy aisles, and Z. has one that's maybe 2 1/2 inches across, bouncy, and day-glo.

We found our perfect puddle near the new play structure in the school's parking lot, pooled up next to the rubber matting that saves the big kids from tumbles. It was a few feet across and maybe two inches deep. Z. hopped and hopped. She pulled me in so we were hopping together. She threw the nobbly-wobbly and ran to get it, over and over, giggling every time. She threw it to me and thought it was the funniest thing in the world when I caught it. She took my hand and walked around and around and around until we were both dizzy, and she took her purple-sandaled feet and swung them through the water, in graceful splashes.

Holding her hand, socks squishing in my gardening shoes, I wondered how I would have felt during her first days--during the first hours when she was buried in wires and the respirator was still making sure she didn't miss a breath--if someone had watched us today and gone back to then to tell me about it. Don't worry: in two years, this girl will have a head full of curls the same color as yours, and make you dizzy with her love of water. I don't know if I could have heard it. I'm pretty sure I couldn't. But if I could, I think I would have been so relieved.

6/20/07, 7 am

daufhyg\hter hon87 the laop6tt editgion

Okay, we just made a deal about keyboard control.

Yesterday:

builders bar
milk (1/2 glass, we ran out)
water
ice tea
leftover sushi
leftover couscous
apple
Wawa hoagie on whole wheat (shorti--I usually go for the classic)
water
oh, and some more water

No exercise to speak of. Oh, Z. and I did our sit-ups (Z. does her sit-ups lying down. The whole time.) I'm up to twenty reps on two of the muscle groups and ten on the others. Beyond that, I guess I walked a few blocks from parking to the theater.

We went to see Pink Martini last night, about which more on the main blog later, I think.

Okay, now it's Z.'s turn, as previously determined. You might want to click on to wherever you were heading now.




z98.8hhhhh8gffiuu5 3wz߃zr60[pm 9nmnkihbgdz]=[ln b

That is all.

6/19/07, one shower later

The other heavy piece of yesterday's session was telling about how a few months after she was born, we took Z. to a post-wedding meal where there was a lot of singing and by coincidence more male voices than she was used to. She was bopping along, in her element--from her earliest days, Z. was always happiest where there were 40 people in a room, infant extrovert--and the singing started and her face crumpled and she fell apart into tears. We didn't understand it. It happened again a little later, at friends' house for shabbat dinner, she was playing on the husband's lap, happily discovering facial hair, when he started singing and again, she crumpled. We did an experiment, and when he sang in falsetto she stayed happy. She also had a little sunsuit with a cow on it, and I would push the cow like it was a button and low. Crying. Just "moo," no tears. Lowing, tears. Finally I figured it out--the low, resonant singing, the lowing, sounded like the moans I made in labor, for three days.

Think about how unbelievably scared she was to be born. And then she was alone in a plastic bin for a week.

6/19/07, 7:20 am

I'm trying not to blog while my mother's here, but it's obviously not working well. Both here I am falling off the bandwagon, and also I went to bed last night feeling fairly rotten, I think because I just didn't write enough yesterday and I had a rough therapy session that involved explaining to Dr. L. how after Z. was transferred I had the thought "well, so much for that pregnancy" and also how I couldn't recognize myself in the mirror. I saw myself haggard and grey and haunted and thought, "this is my mom face." So, not an easy session and I am only now writing about it in the most half-assed fashion right here, trying not to go back and edit much. Blah. So take this as what it is, more or less of a brain dump with no filters. Few filters.

Now I'm stalled.

Last night and in fact for the past few days my head has felt like the top of it, where my cerebral cortex should be, there is a white blank space, like cotton batting or a white linen curtain. I think it may still be Helen's memorial and that whole weekend settling in, and also it may be the result of the beginning of work on my sleep deficit. I'm not sleeping well by any means, but I'm trying so hard not to do the 1 and 2 and 3 am things I was pulling off a few weeks ago. I had an acupuncture session a few weeks back, a gift from a friend who's building her practice. I think that some of the shifts in energy I've had recently do trace back to that, but as A. was saying about her recent thyroid medication, it comes at a time when a lot of things were lining up in that direction anyhow, so it's hard to tell for sure.

But after that session I felt completely sluggish and wiped out, the way an intense massage can make you feel, like your blood really is full of toxins like they say and you should just drink hot lemon water and stay near the toilet until your blood has had time to cleanse and replace itself.

I need time to catch up with myself.

6/17/07, 7:30 pm

Briefly:
Builder's bar
milk
green tea
bagels w/lentil spread, bean spread, brie, tomato (on different parts, not all at one time)
Limeade, homemade, lots
banana
soy dreamer
water
whole wheat couscous salad w/chickpeas, almonds, olives, dill, scallions
carrots
corn chips and bean dip
water
limeade

(general trying to do better on staying hydrated)


Follow-up hand-weeding, family walk.

Sore arms from yesterday.

Something's up with the big and little toes on my right foot.

6/16/07 11 pm

Okay, I've been slacking on actually listing food because I trust myself not to eat the truly empty calories at work, and it's boring. But I also need to start eating better in a positive, not just negative way, and if I find I'm reporting a lot of bagels for lunch during the work week that might actually get me to pack a lunch.

So here was today;

1 1/2 cheese blintzes, with cinnamon
banana
water
quinoa and lentils (leftover)
water
banana (another one)
baked ziti (leftover)
asparagus (leftover)
lemonade, lots (homemade w/sucanat=evaporated cane juice)

I spent about an hour or more in the middle of the day whacking weeds and then while A. and Z. were napping I went to the pool--because I told Jenny I would, so this blog is working, ha!

I think we made it to the Y once this academic year. And I barely managed 10 laps. I'm trying to remember when it was--possibly the window between Z. getting her cast off (Oct. 24, not that I was counting down or anything) and when the retail season kicked into high gear. So let's say the last time I went swimming was in November and I sucked.

I thought I'd be doing well to make it 10 laps today, first time in the pool, all that. I swam 22, the last two just to spite the woman who was sharing my lane (I am always harboring resentment towards strangers who share my lane. It's one of the personality faults I cherish most, since it led to one of the shining moments in my swim career, when I lapped this guy I'd just argued with about pool etiquette, passing him twice before he'd made it much more than halfway down his first length. He got out after that and left me the lane. I want to be in that kind of shape again.)

But back to that 22 laps--that's more than half a mile, first time out. I think I'll be up to a mile easily before the summer's too far along. My recent resolution about walking Z. more just paid off.

This pool is the Girl Scout camp pool, and it's about a ten minute drive out into the suburbs from our house. It backs up onto woods and we often see deer, rabbit and groundhogs when we're out there in the evening. Today was a perfect blue day and it was a real joy to see the sky up there under my arm when I turned to breathe. I'm really an outdoor swimmer, is the thing. I'm happiest in a freshwater lake or pond in New England, the one truly healthy thing about the summer camp I went to, but today was enough.

6/15/07, 6:30 pm

Can I just say about seeing 204 again this morning--it's the first time since a few weeks after I gave birth that the scale has gone down? And there's a completely direct link between my mood and my eating, so I think that I may have turned a corner. Which I mean pretty precisely--I was going in one direction and now I'm facing another, you know, just facing it.

Today I had to drive both ways in order to run errands in combination with day care drop-off and pick-up, so I didn't get any walking in to speak of and not enough actual nutrition--well, builders bars are nutrition, but I mean more like fruit, veggies, cheese. That is what I did not eat when I ate my bagel and ice tea. Tonight is baked ziti. Yum.

Jenny? I'm going to go to the pool at some point this weekend. Beat me up if I don't.

6/14/07, 5:45 pm

204, baby--3 down and let's say 52 to go, why not? I haven't eaten chocolate is maybe two weeks--I didn't even notice until today. And I haven't wanted any.

Today I wound up wearing last year's jeans, which are tight. I don't want to have that phenomenon in my life anymore: tight jeans that fit last year.

Tomorrow's Z.'s last day of school, so I need to find an alternate reason to walk every day. The way I'm currently feeling about my dogs makes them unlikely motivators. Woods, woods, I think I need woods.

What I might be or might not be doing here

This morning's post was not exactly what I expected to be putting in the annex, but it was good for me and had been brewing for awhile. I was thinking that something on the topic would show up on the main blog but it never did, and I'm guessing that it came out here, and I got such a useful response from Jenny (useful in that it pushed my thinking forward) because it was here and not there. The rules I'm setting out for myself are different here, which are to type posts pretty much as I type comments on other people's blogs, without a lot of preplanning or drafting or self-censorship--which I gave myself permission to do by putting the word embarrassing up there on the title page. I might embarrass myself or you, or not, but we all have fair warning. I'm not worrying about attracting links or commenters or being a good blog citizen, all of which I do think about on the main page.

But with that post, suddenly, this space isn't just for accountability anymore. It's also a thinking-out-loud space, and a feedback space. And I like that a lot. So I'm about to lay down some rules for you, too, if you're going to listen in on me. Right now I know most people who read this blog. And I'd like to know everyone. Consider it the difference between meeting me for coffee and a pastry at a busy cafe, and curling up with a cup of tea and dessert in my living room after dinner. In one place you don't mind being overheard. In the other, you do. If you feel comfortable commenting on R. with J., if you know me in real life, if I've commented on your blog a few times, if we are, in short, friends, then I'm really happy that you found your way here. If none of that is true of you, I'd prefer you didn't lurk. Join the conversation on the main blog, which is where I'm putting in more work and more sparkle, anyway, or if you're a shy type you can get in touch with me via email (you'll find it in the "how we do things 'round here" links on the main page) and when we know each other a little better I'll welcome you back.

I'm going to try this on the honor system for awhile and see if it works.

And don't think this morning was all that much of a change. I'm still going to be telling you what I ate most of the time.

6/13/07 8 am

I managed to daven shacharit two mornings in a row, yesterday because I was up so early, today because A. is staying home to grade and took Z. to school. ("Daven shacharit" means "pray the morning service" in a combination of Yiddish and Hebrew as imported into American English. So a very Jewish phrase.)

When I was studying for my adult bat mitzvah, on the advice of my tutor I began praying daily. It complemented the work we were doing in tutoring and it helped me learn the service. I felt very shy about it at first--my Hebrew was lousy (still is) and it took me forever to sound everything out, I went over to the English for a lot of it, for a long time all I did was birchot hashachar, (the morning blessings, the preliminary series of blessings said upon waking) because that took me so long. And apart from bat mitzvah prep, I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing it for.

I don't know if I exactly ever figured that out--the "what" part. God? Tradition? Community?

But eventually I was doing it because the rhythm of doing it moved me and grounded me and elevated me. There are a few key mornings when I remember pouring everything into the service, praying it in my head, trying to get unstuck.

I stopped praying daily long before Ziv was born. I can't even remember why. Partly, it seemed more like A.'s thing. Partly, once A. moved in our commute became complicated so I was waking up earlier. But I was still going to services on Saturday morning and shacharit was still part of how I felt connected to the world and myself.

When we were in Madison, services were so truncated and Jewishly illiterate that I started leading them out of frustration. When we returned home, I was willing to keep it up--and here I need to backpedal a little to explain that our home minyan is the ur-congregation of Reconstructionist Judaism. It is where the staff and students of the Recon Rabbinical College daven, and the staff of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, and all of the Recon rabbis who have settled in Philadelphia doing chaplaincy or non-profit work. Over half of the committee that assembled the siddur for our movement is in the congregation at our minyan.

But after Madison I loved shacharit and I wanted to lead. I also felt that I knew a few things about how to use the prayerbook that the congregation had lost or forgotten over the years. So I was leading about every two months. In my womb, Z. would dance to pesukei dezimrah (verses of praise--drawn from psalms--the introductory part of every service).

I stopped leading after Z. was born and settled into the the nursing mama corner of the room, but I still went more often than not.

What changed was the store. At first it was that it was so exhausting. It's still often so exhausting. But gradually it became more about the times when I did go--everyone would ask me how the store was doing and that is the one question that terrifies me. I don't want to be found out as the disorganized fraud that I am. Also, thinking about "how the store is doing" on shabbat pretty much eliminates shabbat from my life. My work is worrying about how the store is doing and I don't want to fucking do that on shabbat, thank you very much.

So I have disappeared from services. When I do go I feel like I am slinking, spiritually. I am losing a large part of my community and my spiritual grounding because of this, but I am still letting myself do it.

6/12/07, 10 pm

Today I ate 1 Builders bar, one bagel with cream cheese, some baby carrots, and a slice and a half of pizza. I walked 11 blocks, got very wet, gave my daughter's favorite teacher a ride home, decided to take a fairly large gamble on a single night's sales, and made at least two of my most loyal commenters sad. I'm feeling a little irresponsible and self-indulgent.

I'm sorry.

6/12/07, 5:15 am

Well, I got my 8 hours in--from 8 pm to 4 am.

When I was pregnant I always knew it was the kiss of death if I woke up between 3 and 5. No more sleep for S., then. Apparently it's still true. But it's dawn, now. A perfect chance to daven shacharit, something I have been trying to do again lately, with some very limited success.

6/11/07 7pm

Still not much appetite today. Builder's bar, milk, two apples, some lovely cheese, a portabella melt (spinach, provolone, avocado, tomato, whole wheat bun.) Not enough water. Not enough food, really, but nothing I can think of appeals.

I drove Z. this morning because it was raining, but walked her home. I'm especially proud of this because it meant walking the four blocks with the folded stroller slung over my shoulder, and usually I don't bother and just drive. But I did get 8 blocks in that way.

Sleep, sleep. I didn't say anything about sleep while I was traveling, but it was lousy. I discovered that I fully and completely expect a dog to bark at me sometime around 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning, so I woke up at 5:15, managed to doze off until the point when I fully expected a two-year-old to wake up and drag her stepstool over to my bed and clamber in. This happened both mornings, and I wasn't in bed before 1 either night.

The night after the memorial service my brain was whirring so fast it took me until after 2:30 to actually drop off.

Last night wasn't much better.

And now I am going to brush my teeth, put on my pajamas, and take the New Yorker to bed with me. At 7 pm. Can you imagine?

6/11/07 1 pm

Something frankly terrifying is happening over in the main building of this blog. Phantom gave me a link and traffic didn't just double overnight, in less than three hours it more than doubled over yesterday's traffic. I'm actually feeling an adrenaline surge from this--I have a sleepy little blog, with a group of readers who I pretty much all know via blog or real life. Not a lot of lurkers.

Things could change. That's what's scary. I'm not really ready for things to change.

On the other hand, I'm pretty proud of that post. Before I knew what kind of volume I'd get I was happy to think there might be a few more people reading it. But 100 in three hours? Really, it's a little intimidating.

So on to weighty matters.

I was traveling this weekend and it was a trip that had me pretty well flipped out before hand. I don't get panic attacks, but leaving town is the experience that gives me insight into what they must be like. I usually get so keyed up and distracted that I manage to forget something truly significant, like the tickets (back when there were tickets) or my wallet or, you know, underwear.

This time I had everything I needed and I didn't even really overpack. I mean, I did, but the extras were things I needed for emotional armor, just in case. I was out the door exactly on time. And I was in physical pain from how knotted up my stomach was. This is one of the key identifiers of irritable bowel syndrome: it's worsened by stress.

Well, I don't think I finished more than one meal all weekend. Granted, I was eating in restaurants a lot but it's still not like me to pick. I picked. I looked at things on my plate and wondered why anyone would put so much food in one place.

My penultimate meal of the trip was a brunch that consisted of the dining hall food of my late youth. Really, I looked at the homefries and knew exactly how they would taste, exactly the optimal amount of salt and pepper to add, exactly the temperature and the texture. They did not disappoint, but I could not finish them.

6/7/07, 8 pm

Z. and I have taken to doing sit-ups in the mornings and evening. I am working my way up--10, then 12, then 15. Just a single set. Once I'm up to 20 I'll try adding another set, then add in side crunches. I used to do crazy numbers of crunches, multiple sets of 20 on each of the ab muscles, so I want to get back to that point again.

I did finish off that pint of Stonyfield farm yesterday but otherwise was well-behaved (no candy at work). Today I was good. Builders bar, milk, water, bagel and cream cheese, Honest Tea, more water, crepe with cheese and apple, limeade, water, noodles with cannelini, spinach, and parmesan. Some strawberries along the way.

And I walked my 16 blocks.

I'm going to be away from the blog for a few days starting tomorrow. I'm going to travel assuming I'll be reporting back, hopefully that will keep me off the pastries, since this will be a trip of many coffeehouses.

Last night I was in bed by 10. The night before, 1:20.

6/5/07, 8:30 pm

I'm breaking my new rule about no blogging after dinner because I'm too embarrassed to have skipped this blog for this many days in a row. Also, it's not good for me--I started this blog for accountability, because without it I keep screwing myself over.

I'm still doing good on not eating the Bad Things available at work--candy and pastries. I even had leftovers for lunch yesterday so I didn't have bagels. Today I wasn't organized about lunch so I had bagels. I'm not going to beat myself up about bagels.

I'm not sure what I want to do about ice cream. Ice cream has more nutritional value than you might think (flavors differ, of course), and it is good for the soul. I think that ice cream as a leave-the-house treat is perfectly fine. I also know that I'm capable of blowing through a pint of Ben and Jerry's in a day. (When I was thru-hiking, a pint of Ben and Jerry's was a snack.) For the record: I went through a pint of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch over the weekend and have dipped into the pint of Stonyfield Farm chocolate that's in the freezer, but I haven't demolished that one. We wound up with two pints because A. and I bought them simultaneously on different errand runs.

I think I'm going to throw some more embarrassing stuff on this blog, like how often I have sex.

Of course not.

But how late I go to sleep might respond to public airing. Last night it was 1:45, despite keeping to my resolution not to blog after dinner. Instead I finished the book I was reading (reasonable), finished another book I had idly started while reading the first book in this sentence, which meant reading the majority of it (it was short), and then wrote, longhand, for about another hour or so. None of that needed to happen last night.

Exercise: I was a blob all weekend. This was partly because on Sunday I was in a slough of despond, and partly because Saturday I was lazy. Friday and Monday I drove Z. to school and back purely because I was running late, so altogether I missed four days of regular exercise. Today I got my 16 blocks in. Today I expected to blog. So I think that keeping my appointment with this blog is important, but I am going to try to do it earlier in the day.

I need to start doing sit-ups. My back aches when I sleep. So that's another new thing to report on: when did I go to bed last night, and how many sit-ups.

I am currently reading P.G. Wodehouse.

6/1/07, 3:30

Shabbat Shalom--reporting in tomorrow!