Category Archives: DS2

Priorities


I didn’t join the usual group on a long trail run today. The IT band on my left knee has been barking way too much, and since I don’t have any specific goals to run a long distance anytime soon, I thought it best to just start taking it easy with shorter (4.5 miles) less technically challenging trails like the 56 near my house. What I love about that trail is that you really CAN zone out mentally and since I was by myself that is exactly what I did.

And it was good.

OK, so my knee wasn’t so good – it started tightening up as usual around the 2 mile mark despite the easy footing and relatively level ground and mellow pace. That probably means I should stay off of it entirely, but…I need to at least run a little bit!!

Anyway, it was good because I needed that zone out time.

It’s been a little crazy around here.

Por ejemplo – here’s the calendar on the ‘fridge for the next few weeks (mind you, this is after crossing off a week of items from last week)

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It occurred to me as I was running and thinking about how I am only writing in here once a week and feeling guilty – hey it’s a miracle it happens once a week! So, guilt has been released :)

Here’s what I know is going to have to be my priorities for the rest of 2013:

  1. Daily house/cat/kid upkeep
  2. Day job
  3. Football liaison tasks
  4. Blogmutt writing
  5. Running
  6. Everything/everyone else!

Numbers 4 and 5 might swap around depending on how much extra cash I need in a given week. So far, I’m earning between $48-$72/week or, as I like to call it “gas money” :) My goal is to AT LEAST sell 5 posts per week which means writing  5-6 per week (given that about 10% get rejected no matter how well you write). I’ve got 6 in the queue for this coming Thursday, then 4 each week after for the next 3 weeks. That means I really don’t NEED to write 5 new ones this week  or the next which is probably just as well looking at that schedule up there!

The point is that I think I needed that time on the trail to just let my brain settle on this ranking.

That list doesn’t even include the new task I inherited for the football team – website mistress…err..webmistress..er…webmaster….err….crazy person who never learns to stop saying “I can do that?” Yeah..so that was four hours today learning how to use the software and switching every page at all levels to have 2013 information.

Also – yes! 16 is now wearing contact lenses! And I will have “driving glasses”. My near-sightedness has returned somewhat. Just enough that I will feel better having some cheap frames to wear while I drive and watching football games at night. I don’t – and won’t need anything for reading despite my age since the lasik surgery back in 2006 will keep that issue at bay for a quite a bit longer.

Oh, but you should have seen the poor boy learning how to put in those daily wear contacts! He is lucky that his prescription is the same in each eye so we wont have to keep track of leftie and rightie. And the folks at the Optometrist were SO good and patient with him showing how to put them in and take them out. I, of course, was the usual supportive mom sitting and giggling at his red red eyes with the tears flowing out of them :)

Hah – I did the math and I’ve run 143 miles this year! Maybe my knee is right to be cranky and demand some rest. Perhaps I’ll listen to it and go enjoy some quality sofa time now. As you can see, that is a rarity!

 

Xterra Trail Race #3 and…maturity?


As I reported a couple of weeks ago, I think aliens have invaded 16′s brain. Either that, or maybe there was a threshold of maturity crossed recently that appears to be sticking around. I’m crossing fingers for the latter, but not ruling out the former just yet.

He took the ACT test this weekend. And he CARED. He actually did a full practice test online! And? Since this was the ACT-no writing test he asked me to sign him up for the next full scale ACT and even…(gasp)…the SAT!!!

This from the kid who REFUSED less than a year ago to even CONSIDER taking the SAT when he knew computer majors didn’t *really* need it. And he insisted on the NO WRITING test too.

Suddenly he can tell you that his GPA is finally closer to 3 than 2.5 and that he WANTS to take all the normal college entrance exams.

Oh, and he thought the ACT no writing test was stupidly easy. Math was 8th grade level at best in his opinion, and he is no longer impressed if he hears of near perfect scores. He’s thinking that American schools are slacking. Yeah, probably so kiddo!

Anyway, I even marginally tricked him into doing the dishes twice this week without any whining. Again – WHO IS THIS??

Of course, even though he is now done with PT and is cleared to start running again on his newly repaired knee, he still wasn’t willing to join me on a mid-week jog around the block or an evening run tonight. So there’s still that.

Speaking of running…yes, I finally DID keep my promise to run on Wed night after work! It felt great, and I did my usual 2.3 mile hilly loop in record time without really trying to run too fast. Guess those long slow trail runs are helping my short course speed.

Meanwhile, instead of joining R2 for usual monster run this morning, I ran in my third in the Xterra trail race series. The first was Crystal Cove, the second was Mission Trails, and today was Black Mountain. It was a 6k route and just about in my backyard only 5 miles east of me. It was a nice change to not have to drive on the freeway to get to a race!

Unfortunately, someone turned on the cold and wind and wet again around here, AND this course was an ASS KICKER!

Come to think of it, Xterra only does ass kickers. The hills are always intense, and today was no different. 2+ miles barreling down down down with an occasional straightaway or small uphill only to go down again. The rule in running of course, is that what goes down, must come UP. And come UP we did. The last mile solid was UP UP UP. No switchback, no level off, just UP. I walked it. Wanted something in the tank to run through the finish line.

The best part was that as we all gathered before the start, I chatted with some lovely ladies who were also talking about going nice and slow. Having found some kindred spirits, I stuck with one of them most of the way and made sure to stay and cheer them in after I finished. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we are now all facebook friends and will be following each other’s running exploits via blogs.

Also, I still ran with R2 – she has a new thing on her training plan – she does the long run in the morning then has another 1:15 in the evening. Just got home from that so I did 9.3 miles total today. OUCH. I’m going to make some tea and rest now. Enjoy the photos :)

Cold, gray, and windy at the start

Cold, gray, and windy at the start

Gorgeous in the canyon - more spring flowers in bloom!

Gorgeous in the canyon – more spring flowers in bloom!

5th in my age group! Dang it - could been 4th if I had known the course a little better. :)

5th in my age group! Dang it – could been 4th if I had known the course a little better. :)

New friends in running! Great job ladies! Thanks for the companionship.

New friends in running! Great job ladies! Thanks for the companionship.

 

 

 

 

Don’t lose hope for those teenagers!


I know, if you have one in the house you experience pretty non-stop sarcasm, eye rolls, laziness beyond belief and bedrooms that would scare a skunk. But sometimes….SOMETIMES….they do show signs of being human.

Por ejemplo….

Last weekend 16 and his dad borrowed my lawn mower to use at a rental property of theirs that had an extremely overgrown yard. After a day of working with his dad (yes, his knee is healing that well!)..they dropped it back off and I asked him if he now knew how to use the mower.

“Yep” he declared. (shock..I figured he would see where I was going with this…)

So then I told him that it sounded like he was ready to take over the lawn mowing duties from his older brother and if that was the case, then could he please plan on doing that Saturday?

“Sure. I can do that.”….(huh? who are you?)

So, Friday rolls around and I reminded him about the yard work and since he had plans to go up to a friend’s house in the evening, then he should plan for yard work time before leaving.

“Yeah, no problem, I’m not heading up there until after 5pm anyway.”…(wow, four days later and he’s still not only open to it, but not even whining about it?!”

Saturday I go for my weekend trail run (moved it away from Easter Sunday to free up the day) and get home around 10am. He’s awake and watching tv on the sofa. I’ve decided that it would be better for me to do my part of the weeding on the hillside while I am still grimy from the run so I grab something to eat and then mention that I’m going to head outside.

“Yeah, good idea, let’s get it done.”…he says without a hint of a grumble and then turns off the TV to go get a shirt…(seriously, who IS this?!!)

Not only does he mow the lawn, but he dumps the cuttings and even helps pull some of the weeds. I really didn’t want him up on the hillside on his knee so I did most of that work but he cleaned up everything after me so all I had to do was pull weeds.

Side note: I take to yard work sort of like I do laundry – I love the PROCESS – but I HATE the cleaning up (or, the folding & putting away). There have been many times when I spent hours trimming bushes and pulling weeds only to leave the debris on the hillside or the sidewalk for the next day because I just COULD NOT face putting it in the trash can.

With 16 doing that dreaded final step, we were done with what I wanted cleared out in less than 90 minutes. In the end, there was a teensy bit of whining whle we were working – of course! There had to be right? But it was pretty equally coming from me as much as him! And considering how cooperative he had been leading into it – who cares??!!

Now if only I could find the magic potion that would KEEP him this way :)

Knee repair update & St Paddy Day trail run


Happy St Patrick’s Day!

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Aren’t those awesome socks? Pro Compression and yes, I wore them for the run today. Had to, right?

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A two hour “easy” run was the plan.  We thought we would do some exploring. We’ve been eyeing the Santa Fe Valley trail which is the west end of the Lake Hodges Trail we took last week. They do connect at the dam so conceivably if I can properly find the western end of this and start there, you could run all the way from Rancho Santa Fe to the 15 freeway. That’s a long one though! Anyway, today we parked at a spot in between and ran west first, then back east to the dam, then back to the car. a shade under 9 miles. The western part revealed this gorgeous spot:

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The bridge up above was further east and brought us ti the other side of the river so that when you get to the dam you are on the “road” side just under Del Dios Highway. As we were running back, we encountered a mini St Paddy’s Day parade of horses and riders all decked out properly in green:

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It was a fabulous run that I think we will be doing again.

Meanwhile, the reason I’ve been absent from writing in here this week was the knee surgery, the freelance writing and yet more football meetings. Writing is going well. Sold another post this week and I have 7 in line for next week. Finally did get one rejected but it doesn’t bother me because I figured out that the vendor in question does that a lot randomly and with no real reason. I hadn’t noticed the “posted” and “rejected” tabs on a customer page before and one I looked into theirs I saw they had rejected as many as they had posted. Eh. The site stated that no matter how well you write, everyone has about a 10% reject rate so that is to be expected. I’ve written 14 so I was bound to lose one.

OK, so knee surgery – it went VERY well. This was the patient on Tuesday after coming home. He is hooked up to a Cold Therapy Unit that mixes ice and water and runs it up tubes to a pad strapped to his knee keeping a constant flow of nearly ice cold water surrounding the area.

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So as not to freak out anyone with a squeamish tummy, the next two photos (which I happen to think are not that bad) will be below the fold. They are of a knee freshly unwrapped from the dressing so there’s an incision spot and some very slight swelling showing. Then there’s what they found while they were in there – some very irritated Plica tissue which is soft tissue on the inside of the knee cap that had become fibrous and stiff preventing the knee cap from moving smoothly. It was HUGE relief to everyone that this was found! It meant not having to do a Lateral Release which takes longer to heal and was not a 100% cure. By finding something concrete to fix, that was right in the spot where he always had the pain (and was starting to feel the grinding), the little bit of scraping they had to do to clean out that tissue was much less intrusive and is probably why his swelling is NOT all that bad. So click on the “Continue Reading” link to see the pics. Continue reading →

Ever pack 3 days into one?


I’m pretty sure I did that on Thursday and again today.

Today I had 8 things on my To DO list – some fun, some chores, some money making blog work. I did 5 so that’s not too bad when you consider I also spent time with the boyfriend.

Anyway – my whole money saving goal was a) blown out of the water this week and b) a life saver when I needed cash and had to shut down my bank accounts on a Friday night! (possibly to be explained later, but everything is OK now).

So yeah, I’m at $3  in coins right now, but it will all be replenished if not next week, then by 4/15 for sure (and then some, there’s another teaser that I cannot explain just yet either!)

Exercise mid week went MUCH better! You saw the routine that I posted – I did that VERY diligently for the first hour & a half of Biggest Loser and that ended up being more than 30 minutes of course (damn commercials!) I did the same routine again while watching TV Wednesday night though not quite as long. Still, my abs HURT after two nights of all that!

I’ve begun the last step in my volunteering journey. Going out in a blaze a glory as a co-parent liaison for the varsity football program at the high school. We met Thursday with the coach and outgoing liaison and I have another meeting tomorrow morning because we have to launch right into planning for the first spirit wear website setup and sales and the budget for next year. That’s my main role – finances – which is right up my alley of course.

Speaking of football – so remember that 16 had a bum knee last summer? Well, let’s be honest – not just last summer – pretty much since he was 11 or so only it was never bad enough, long enough for him to complain and request a doctor visit. Last winter/spring he finally did and went through an MRI and then physical therapy and a regimen of icing/ibuprofren and continued stretches to try and get the knee cap to get back on track without surgery. A year of that which included the two months of complete rest with the concussion and there is still no change.

Tuesday, he has arthroscopic surgery. Two small incisions and they will look around to see if the MRI missed anything and also check to see if there is anything physically keeping the knee cap from resting in the right groove. If so, they will clean that up. They may also perform a lateral pressure release which…I cannot entirely remember! Anyway, just 45 minutes supposedly though he will be under anesthesia and he will end up with a pretty painful and swollen knee for a few weeks. BUT – once that heals, the ortho is saying he will be good to go and play football one last year. And that’s the whole goal isn’t it? As I said when we were there for a visit in early Feb – “Doc, bottom line, he has one more year to play football. Senior year. He can start if he’s healthy.  This is what he has been dreaming about for his whole life – to play varsity football for the Falcons. What can we do to have him ready to play flag football with the team in May, get back to weight training and be full speed in the summer?”

Check in time is 6:30am – umm..say what? Is there a bed for me to sleep on? :-)

Oh! I’ve picked up a writing gig to hone my skills and earn a wee bit of cash (for the play money fund most likely) $8 per purchased blog post. You search through the client list and find keywords and craft a 300 or so word post. If the client likes it and buys it – $8! I sold one this week and have 6 in the queue. 3 have been reviewed and are scheduled to be bought 3/21 – they get pulled every Thursday. It’s a fun challenge! You can either pick keywords that you know like the back of your hand such as the two I wrote last night on sports blogging and excel 2010, or you can try something totally different and take some time to research it a bit. I’m really loving it so far. I wont make Big Money with this company, but I will learn a TON. It is almost like landing an internship in copy writing/content writing. You have to cater to different companies across a vast spectrum of topics and style types. One company my LOVE your stuff and one might reject it. What I’ve learned from chatting in the forum with other writers is that once you find clients who like you and build up a rapport, you can almost count on them giving your posts 5 stars and moving them up in line to be purchased next.

First though, I need to have more than an hour at the end of every day to focus on it. In fact, I was supposed to block out some time today to do that, but it fell off the list. And now it is late….heck..really it is TOO LATE because we Spring Forward tonight! Yipes! That’s good though – it means I can run after work again instead of just on the weekends. Speaking of which, since I have a coffee meeting for football tomorrow I wont be joining Renee for the 3+ hour marathon. So instead, I joined her today out at Lake Hodges for a mere 90 minutes and 7 miles. Running out there the day after rain? AMAZING!

Lake Hodges

 

 

Football Dinner


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Yeah, this is how the night started out – the current parent liaison gives me this monstrosity to thank me for always volunteering for the little things when he asked. Fine, but I am not doing HIS job (by myself) next year! And now I have to keep this thing for a year. I’m already plotting who to pass it on to next year!

It was a long, but truly fun evening. The senior class of players are just a great group of guys who clearly all got along so well. They all sat up front on a stage with their jerseys draped in front of them at their seats. One by one each coach had players come up so that they could say a few things about them and then give them their varsity letter. Yes, even with all his injuries, 16 earned his letter! Now we get to figure out how to pay for one of those letterman jackets ($$)!

The seniors also had to do parent thank yous. One by one they took the microphone and presented a rose to a parent (usually the mom) and thanked them for the years of support during their youth sports careers. Most were nervous, some were touching (even a rap poem!) and some were truly funny.  What cracked me up was that so many of the boys started off with “This is my mom. She did all my dirty laundry, made me lunch and extra snacks during 2-a days and throughout the football season….”

And I would think “Uh, whoops!” Not being a stay at home mom, I couldn’t even contemplate those things! So it was with great relief when one boy finally got up and said: “This is mom, she didn’t do my laundry – she taught ME how to do it myself!” YAY!!!

16 and I talked about it on the way home and I have a feeling we will have some sort of comedy routine all picked out by this time next year.

I also hope he gets a little bit better about tying a tie – which I cannot do and which he was doing while watching a You Tube video not 5 minutes before we had to leave. So given those extreme efforts that he took, I then had to insist on pictures -

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Oct 17 – Improvement!


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Much better, yes? 16′s concussion symptom scores were still in the low 20′s a week ago, but they finally started dropping down into the teens around the 10th and then Monday saw a larger drop. We had another checkup with the doctor in the afternoon – these will occur weekly until the doctor can sign off to say he is no longer concussed.

Cognitively he is improving. He took a 45 minute exam in computer science Monday and the only part he couldn’t handle was the section that had been taught the days immediately after the concussion – one day when he stayed home entirely and the other when he was at his worst. The teacher is going to let him re-take those two sections later next week. He read Chapter 8 of Gatsby entirely on his own and answered the chapter questions last night only consulting with me on one of the 11. Much better!

His math teacher is letting him gradually make up the homework assignments he missed and there doesn’t seem to have been a ton of impact on History or Chemistry.

Ironically, while math & computer science grades fell (which he is being allowed to make up), English went UP :-)

He no longer needs to take pain meds to attend the games because the sound doesn’t make his head hurt worse anymore. He just seems to be carrying around a low grade headache and occasional problems with his balance. That one is funny – in the doctor’s office he had some issue standing on one leg and doing the head to toe walk for 10 steady steps. He was actually better at that at the last visit! But, he said that the balance issues come and go randomly so I guess it was good that he displayed that symptom in the exam room.

Anyway, it’s slower going than last year, but I think that a corner has been turned – keep those fingers crossed!

 

PS – anyone else noticed something in common this month with The Merry Month of May when I first tried out the daily posts? In May I was obsessed with Chip and his bladder issues. This month we have 16 & his concussion. I may rethink any future plans to do a month of daily posts!! No good for the family’s health ;-/

Oct 8 – Another Recipe and all football weekend fun


First, the recipe which was a huge hit and super easy to make:

The original source is the Ultimate Slow Cooker BBQ Shredded Beef recipe found and shared by an August Mom who also has to feed a house full of hungry boys!

My house was full because one of 16′s teammates stayed with us Sat night so I got up and put this in the crock pot Sunday morning to be ready for lunch. Our guest ate 2 large sandwiches so I gather this has been approved :-)

I mentioned previously that this weekend was potentially going to be weird and melancholy since I was missing my mom friend’s annual gathering. Well, Thursday night we took advantage of technology and used Face Time so that I could join in on the post dinner nighttime conversation session. Two hours later I was feeling pretty filled up with the sounds of laughter and friendship – enough to carry me through this weekend without feeling too down at all! Which is good since I subsequently didn’t have time to hang out with them virtually the other nights.

The Friday Night game was bad..the team lost 35-0. Sat night I took the boys down to the SDSU Aztecs football game which was a lot more fun to watch. We left early with the Aztecs leading by a ton, but didn’t want to risk the big fireworks show bugging 16′s concussion. Plus, the boys wanted to play video games for awhile and I had ordered a midnight cutoff so that he could get some much needed sleep and keep healing.

Meanwhile I had volunteered to handle the varsity team’s participation in a fundraiser requiring me to mail out forms. Those were delivered to me Saturday so I spent the morning on Sunday stuffing envelopes and then I had the boys label and stamp them. We did all this while watching morning NFL games.

Yes, that’s high school, college and NFL games that we watched over the weekend. While stuffing envelopes for a football fundraiser.

You think we like football just a tad?

So my fear of a being sad all weekend was unfounded. Technology, football and time spent with the boys cleared all that up nicely :-)

Oct 5 – Teenage wasteland


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Be happy it is blurry.

I would love to blame the concussion on the state of his room, but let’s be real. he’s a 16 year old boy. This is pretty much a constant until I pitch a fit (as I did after taking this picture) and force him to clean.

Sigh………………