Home, sweet home

I'm back.

Like a lot of you, I was horrified this past week by the severe weather throughout the U.S. (As far as I know, all of the people I am related to/know/have had contact with in the affected areas are OK). I really hope this is an end to tornadoes - at least, big damaging tornadoes, because I suppose we'll never really get an end to tornadoes in the spring - for a while. We had some severe storms up where my parents lived - being awakened by what sounds like lightning striking an electrical transformer at 4 am isn't fun - but no tornadoes right near us.

I did get a fair amount of knitting done; pictures to come later.

No yarn buying, though - apparently the yarn shop in my parents' town closed up. I say "apparently" because there was no notice of the closing anywhere, the last time my mother had driven by it it was open, but when we went, it was all empty and gone. (And the phone was disconnected, so I'd think if they had merely moved there'd be some message.) I have to admit that for a day or two that awoke a shaky impulse in me that said "Must buy all the yarn you would possibly need for the rest of your life; maybe the economy really is tanking so badly that all the fun things like yarn shops and quilt shops will go away soon." Then I decided that things like Brown Sheep (a U.S. based, family owned yarn company) have been around for ages (Brown Sheep since 1910), and that there were shops and manufacturers that weathered even bigger problems than an economic downturn in a time when lots of people are knitting and knitting is popular. (Yes, I know - the other direction that impulse could go would me "Must learn to spin my own yarn" but I have a feeling that that would eventually lead to "Must buy land outside of town so I can raise my own sheep" and that would go nowhere good.)

But still, it was kind of sad. So I guess I'm back to mostly online or catalog buying. Or planning very carefully when I go places for meetings and demanding of whoever I am traveling with that time be made to visit any yarn shop in the vicinity.

I had my annual checkup while I was up there - as I said, maybe in the post that got eaten during the Blogger outage, I have issues with doctors and when I find one that's willing to accept that I'm smart enough to know that I'm heavy and don't need an annual shaming lecture about it, I stick with them, even if they're so far out of my "network" that I pay for the visit out of my own pocket.

I will say my weight was down this year. A tiny, infinitesimal bit, but the fact that (a) I wasn't actively dieting this past year, (b) I hadn't been very active these past couple weeks thanks to the bursitis in my hip, and (c) I'm a woman over 40, who even at younger ages had a hard time dropping weight, I'll take it.

(The verdict: "You're very healthy, I'll see you next year." So OK, maybe I'm bigger that I "should" be, but apparently at this point it is not having adverse effects. And I wonder if a certain amount of that "heavy" is actually more muscle development; when I went in for the annual screening-of-the-breasts, the radiological technician commented that I had well-developed pectoral muscles for a woman. Heh. "Lady pecs," like they say on "Regular Show." (But they mean something else, and I think "lady pecs" is one of the funnier euphemisms for breasts that I've heard.))

I will say I am going to try to get more active this summer, and maybe continue to slowly shift my diet to a higher-protein one (not crazy, not to the point of cutting out bread or cereal or anything, but I think the near-vegetarian diet I was on for years maybe wasn't as good for me as I thought it was), and maybe next year I'll have dropped a little more. (I have been trying to eat higher-protein lunches, after realizing that I didn't get crazy-hungry at 3 or 4 pm when I got home).

One thing I am going to do is make my own "sausage." In scare quotes because it's not really real sausage - it's just low-fat ground chicken or turkey with some kind of spice added, formed into patties and frozen, so I can then fry one or two up quickly in the morning on days when I know I have an active morning planned. My mom does something like this for my dad - with a low salt spice mix because he's on a low salt diet, and commercial sausage is awfully salty - and I tried some of it and found it good - actually, better to my liking in the morning than "real" sausage, because "real" sausage is too fatty for me that early in the day and I get indigestion from it. But the turkey or chicken sausage worked fine, so that's going to be something I try now.

I also want to bake more bread this summer, with (hopefully) more free time because of not teaching. I made soft pretzels just for fun when I was up visiting my parents and realized that I forget how much fun it is for me to make bread from scratch. (And the pretzel recipe turned out better than any I've tried before; it's a modification of an Alton Brown recipe and you do boil the pretzels in a "brine" of water and baking soda before baking them - and amazingly, they get that shiny outer coat, and that dense chewy interior, like commercial soft pretzels have.)

It's going to be strange this coming week to ONLY be gearing up for research, and not gearing up for summer research AND teaching. Sort of nice, actually, I think.

And the bursitis is mostly better. I think part of it was an issue of time, part of it was not stressing it by not doing vigorous exercise for a while, but also, I took the recommendation of one of my parents' neighbors (a retired trainer for the women's teams at one of the colleges in their town) to take a very low dose of an anti-inflammatory in the morning and at night - and to keep that up for a month. (It stands to reason that that should work; after all, bursitis is an inflammation.) I did do some walking while I was up there over break and that seemed to help as well.