Category Archives: Health

Y not?

So, after hem hawing around for a couple of weeks, or more like a month, given the date on this post, I finally bit the bullet and [re]joined the Y yesterday.  This involved some serious bundling before the 3/4 mile trek from my apartment.  The conditions were about as blizzard-like as things can get with only an inch of snow — the wind was doing its best given the paltry amount of precipitation available.

Properly dressed, the walk wasn’t bad at all, and I probably spent less time outside than some people spent scraping their cars.

I made immediate use of my new membership with about an hour of weights, upper and lower body.  My goal is to hit the gym three days a week — Fridays, Sundays, and one weekday evening.

I returned home to lunch #2 (I ate a small snack, AKA lunch #1, before the gym), leftovers of a fabulous soup that I made on Friday night.  After a bit of a cooking hiatus, I’m back in the swing in the kitchen — more details to come, including a recipe or two.

Bread & tomatoes, illness on the side

Sick + Writer’s block + Entertaining + Tiring week at work (last week) = not much blogging around this place.

While I have a relatively high pain tolerance, I don’t do sick well.  This has been the kind of mildly sick where I’m still able to function, albeit at a slightly reduced level.

Saturday night I passed out on the couch at some early hour, abandoning Matthew to start the bread making on his own.  This resulted in a new note on our whole wheat bread recipe: “Do not start at 9 o’clock at night.”  Even though he was only getting the dough together so it could have a long first rise on our cool back porch overnight, he didn’t make it to bed until after midnight.  (I moved from the couch to the bed sometime before then, pausing only to brush my teeth, no energy for flossing or neti-ing.)

Sadly, the bread did not turn out as well as it has in the past.  Still good, just not the “We should open a bakery and sell this for $5 a loaf” quality that we were expecting.  The bread served as the base for some very-late-season Caprese Salad Sandwiches last night.

We’re slowly working our way through the last of the garden tomatoes.  We (and by we, I pretty much mean Matthew’s mom) harvested a boatload of tomatoes a few weeks back and they’ve been slowly ripening (as well as slowly rotting, in a few unfortunate cases) in boxes in our living room ever since.

A few of the things that we’ve done with the tomatoes:

  • Roasted tomatoes
  • Tomato sauce (we need to make more)
  • Tomato tart (the crust has some serious butter)
  • Pizzas
  • And, of course, the Caprese Salad Sandwiches

My usual recourse for ripening tomatoes (and other unripe fruit) is a paper bag, but we had way too many tomatoes for that.  Instead, we set the tomatoes in single layers in cardboard boxes and covered them with newspaper — fast to arrange and easy to keep an eye on them.

Physical inactivity

Not even sure where to start with this one, but it basically goes something like this.  I went away to college and spent a few months not doing much in the way of exercise, other than walking all over the beautiful Notre Dame campus going to classes and such.

At some point not quite halfway through freshman year, I discovered the beautiful (and FREE) fitness center, where I spent significant time over the next 3.5 years (especially after I got a job there).  I enjoyed nice balanced workouts with cardio (I was the elliptical queen) and weight lifting.  Thanks to good weight training instruction in high school, I was not intimidated by the machines, free weights, or disproportionate number of males on the weights side of the fitness room.

Grad school also brought “free gym” perks and a small, but adequate, fitness facility right in the basement of the public health building.  After I graduated, I even ponied up for a staff membership, since I continued to work in the same building.  I think it came out to around $20/month, which I didn’t quite appreciate for the bargain it was.Continue reading “Physical inactivity”

Makeup remover

A makeup-related post on Tiny Choices, along with a recent survey on another site, made me aware that my makeup-free face is an exception in our culture, not the norm.  Not by a long shot.

I did wear makeup in the past, but never much, as explained in part of my comment on Tiny Choices:

“My mother was/is a wonderful role model for natural beauty with minimal or no makeup, and I have happily followed in her footsteps. At my most ‘makeup heavy’ (high school and college), I wore mascara, concealer, and powder (so my face wouldn’t be ‘shiny’), and possibly a bit of eye shadow. I never could stand how either foundation or lipstick felt, and I’m glad I listened to my body’s cues and minimized the chemical exposure.”

So what about that chemical exposure?Continue reading “Makeup remover”

Neti on the road

Though there are ceramic neti pots available, I chose plastic because  I wanted to be able to travel with my neti pot.  I premix pickling salt and baking powder for however long I’ll be gone.

Strangely enough, small plastic bags filled with white powder may arouse suspicion at airport security checks.  This occurred to me as I packed for my trip to D.C. back in March.  Sure enough, after scanning my carry-on, they pulled it off of the belt and asked for “the owner of this bag” to step to the side.

When the TSA officer opened my bag and held up the little baggy, I prepared for the worst.  Granted, the baggie was WITH my neti pot, and I had halfway been expecting this, so I calmly explained the whole thing.  The officer swabbed my bag (not sure whether she was ruling out drugs or just explosives) and sent me on my way, neti salts intact, no drug dogs involved.

Maintaining the neti routine on the road can be tricky.  When I was in Chattanooga last month, my hotel room did not have a microwave.  The only way to get warm water was to use it straight from the tap, without giving it time to dechlorinate.  Ouch!  Did that ever burn!  It was bad enough that I skipped one day (despite the high ragweed levels), then went crawling back for more when the congestion got too unbearable.

While nasal irrigation is not the perfect cure, it works at least as well as prescription nasal inhalants (i.e., Flonase) for the allergies, at a fraction of the cost, and no drugs involved.  Neither method is perfect — with both I get/got occasional sinus headaches when allergen levels are crazy high.  However, regular neti-ing  provides the added bonus of removing other invaders, like bacteria and viruses, giving me a leg-up on staying healthy — works for me!