Lura Thoughts

Oscillating Make-up

It's not often that my former life as an vibrations engineer and my current life as stay at home mom, trainer to the yellow dogs, and chauffer for the kids coincide.

But today, as I was letting four 13 year old girls loose in the mall, I enjoyed a little shopping of my own.  I happened upon the Lancome counter, as I was in need of some pressed powder.  And what did I see there?  Yes, it's true, it was Oscillating Powder Make-up with SPF 21.  Who would have thought?  Vibrations meets make-up.

I knew it was a little gimmicky, but really, I had to see, didn't I?  In fact, it is very gimmicky, but I kind of needed some make-up with an SPF in it.  The application brush vibrated, which I think was supposed to give your face a massage.  Truth be told, you can't really feel it on your face, but I gave in to the total coolness of it.  Or nerdiness.  I'm not sure which.

Of course, if you're going to have Oscillating Pressed Powder Make-up, then you also have to have the Oscillating Mascara.

I think that goes without saying.

No Palinphobia Here

While I've been not blogging, but instead running with my dogs, playing with the kids, and vacationing, the world just gets more and more interesting.  SC governor Mark Sanford went missing for a while, President Obama went to Russia, and, while I was at the Broadmoor competing in the rubber duck races, Governor Palin announced that she was quitting.  When I first heard about her quitting, I thought she meant that she simply wasn't running for re-election.  Of course she wasn't, I thought, she'll be running for President.  But then I found out that by quitting, she meant she was really quitting.  As in, done.  No more governor.  And she somehow insinuated that she was doing so because she isn't a quitter.

But the really interesting thing about all of this is what I've been listening to on the radio and reading on RealClearPolitics; it seems that democrats are SCARED of Sarah Palin.  It must be true because Dan Caplis says it all the time.  The right-wing commentary boards proclaim it loudly.

I just want to clear the air here.  Sarah Palin holds no fear for me.

As a matter of fact, I wouldn't mind having her over for tea.  I'd even cook up some scones for her, and I bet we'd have a nice time chatting about parenting.

I also wouldn't mind seeing her run for some more elected offices.  I'd even welcome it, because I'm pretty sure my yellow labs have a better chance of getting elected than she does.  I mean, come on, my labs are seriously cute.

And, if it really came to it, I'm pretty sure I could take Sarah in a fair fight.  I couldn't beat her in a marathon, and I think she'd actually be tough, but I could take her.

But scared of her?  Hardly.

Sunday Lijit Stats

I've blogged before about how much I love the Lijit statistics.  I can log into Lijit at any time to find out how many readers I have and what people are coming to my blog to read.  On Sunday evenings, I get an e-mail with the same information.  Useful stuff.

Interestingly, the terms that bring people to my blog most are still Slim4Life and Deeptone, even though I blog about a cornucopia of topics. 

Unfortunately, though, I haven't blogged in months.  Every week I get those Sunday e-mails, showing lower and lower numbers of readers. 

I've come to hate those Sunday Lijit stats because they are a weekly reminder of a commitment that I've been completely neglecting, like a teacher giving me a failing grade.

Maybe I'll have to blog more.

Living with the Kindle for over a year

Let me just say this:  I love the kindle!

We went on a vacation to Phoenix over spring break, and I had downloaded one of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books.  The books are very, very light.  They're not great literature, but they're fun, fast reads.  Unfortunately, they're a little too fast.  By the time we had arrived in Phoenix, with all of the waiting at the airport and reading on the plane, I had already finished my novel.  If I had carried the actual book with me, I would have been stuck on vacation with nothing to read, a fate practically worse than death, since vacations are about the only time I really do a lot of reading.  Luckily, though, I had the kindle instead.  I simply downloaded the next book in the series.  I went through three of Evanovich's novels, in addition to reading several other things.  The kindle made it so that I didn't need to carry a bunch of reading material, and I could choose real-time what I was going to read.

I've also always been a fan of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.  My mom bought an entire bag full of these magazines when I was about 16.  We spent the next three weeks or so reading every one of them.  Each edition has about 1 or 2 stories that are really good, well-written with a great twist.  I love those stories.  Each edition also has several that are pretty good, and 1 or 2 that you read and ask yourself how they could have published that story.  As a writer, I have submitted several stories to EQMM, none of which they've published (but several of them found homes elsewhere).  Unfortunately, I found that life got in the way of my reading, and I let my subscription slip.  My mom sent me out a couple that had a lot of really good stories in them about a two years ago, and my dog ate them.  Imagine my delight when I discovered that EQMM is now available on the kindle!  Now they download automatically to my kindle, and I read them as I have time.  Sometimes I miss an entire issue, sometimes I read the entire issue, but it's inexpensive and nice to turn on my kindle and find a new EQMM, and the dogs have not expressed in interest in eating the kindle. The only drawback is that the kindle still has no notion of page numbers, a difficult problem for them because page number would change with they're varying font size.  Still, I wish they could at least publish the page numbers as they might appear in the actual magazine, because I have no idea how long or short a story is going to be.  If I start reading a story, should I stop soon because it's so long?  Or will I be done in a minute anyway?  I just don't know.  That's frustrating.

The other problem with a kindle over an actual book comes when you're reading a reference book or other type of non-fiction where you want to keep a couple of pages marked.  It's very difficult on the kindle, even with their bookmark feature, to go back and reference a page like you would a book.  My most recent example is in reading a diet book that I want to go straight to the actual diet.  Sometimes you can't tell from the table of contents where the diet is, but in a real book, you can flip through and find the diet easily enough.  With a real book, too, you can mark a couple of pages, have the recipes that you want available, and have the diet available.  If you reference those pages enough, the books just naturally opens to them. 

However, the best thing that I've found with the kindle is the ability to increase the font size as my eyes get worse.  My last diet book had a tiny, tiny font (okay, my kids could read it easily).  Who needs reading glasses, though, when you've got the kindle, that can make each letter practically the size of the page so that I can read it?

Overall, the kindle rocks!

Pirates!

I've been following the whole Pirates in Somalia event with a lot of interest.  Who isn't?  Just the term "pirates" makes it fascinating.  Nobody really thought of pirates as something that is still around today; the term evokes swashbucklers and Johnny Depp, not really anything serious.

Unfortunately, what happened off the coast of Somalia was deadly serious, and I don't mean to make light of that, or of the incredible heroism that was shown by everybody involved in rescuing Captain Richard Phillips.  But still, I couldn't help but see that the correlation, first documented by the Pastafarians, was no doubt once again validated:

 

The recent events support this data.  First, three pirates were shot, quite efficiently, in the head by Navy Seal sharpshooters this Sunday.  Notice that here in Denver, the weather went from cold and rainy to warm and 70's with three pirates less.  Then, as the week went on, the pirates regrouped, and no doubt were able to recruit more to join their forces.  What is the result?  Colder weather, with storms and 40's tomorrow; 30's and snow on Saturday. 

Coincidence?  I think not.

Yoga Toes Revisted

It's been almost a full month since I received the Yoga Toes in the mail.  They don't look like much, just sort of bigger, squishier pedicure toe separators.  I also got the Yoga Toe vibrators, which sounds much more exciting than it really is.  The little vibrators attach to the Yoga Toes and make your feet vibrate at a high frequency.  Mine make the dogs bark, but they feel quite nice.

So after a month, what was my conclusion?  On Wednesday, I would have told you that I'm having huge success with them!  Unfortunately, Wednesday is my Deeptone class, and Wednesday nights is the teacher who is a cross between Gizelle from Enchanted, sweet and kind, and Jillian from Biggest Loser, mean and pushy.  "If you're not puking or fainting, then don't stop!"  Except that she says these things in the sweetest voice.  "Oh, Lura, you really need much more weight than that!"  "Lura, don't even think about using the 8 pound weights, you really need the 15's!"  This, of course, after my arms were so rubbery that I couldn't even lift my water bottle to my lips. 

Working out Wednesday night, Gizillian pushed me to use more and more weights with the various leg exercises.  I was fine with being challenged, because, after the broken toe, the bruised elbow, the wasp sting, and now the plantar fasciitis seemed much better, I felt like I could handle the challenge.  Admittedly, my foot felt fine during the entire workout.

The next day I could barely walk.

It was easily two steps forward, five steps back.  I've been nursing my foot back ever since.  I'm back to more motrin, icing, stretching, hot tubbing, and wearing the orthotics.  These were all of the same things I was doing before the Yoga Toes came in the mail, and they seemed to be working, but very s-l-o-w-l-y.  I'm hopeful that with the addition of the Yoga Toes, my foot will be back in tip top condition much sooner.  I'm keeping my toes crossed!

Chip and Scout and Marley and Me

Is there anybody out there who hasn't either read the book, seen the movie, or at least heard about Marley and Me?  John Grogan, the author, found fame and fortune in the antics of his "incorrigible" yellow lab, making all of us other lab owners slap our heads and say, "D'oh!  Why didn't I think to write that book?" 

  

Because, after all, Marley really just isn't that different from any other yellow lab, or at least he's not that different from my guys, Chip and Scout.

Chip is happy-go-lucky, always ready with a smile and a wag, and always ready to cause trouble.  The only reason that he doesn't just continuously eat our couch, as Marley does in the movie, is because he's never left unsupervised in the house.  That, and I walk the two dogs until my legs fall off every day.  Chip learned at an early age that every stranger is a BFF just waiting to be discovered.  Admittedly, he was pretty cute, and everybody opened their arms and leaned over to cuddle with him.  Now he's a 75 pound dog, and he still expects everybody to greet him the same way.  Some would say that he's overly friendly.  We had to close the door to the bathroom because Chip would roll out the toilet paper. Chip steals things off the counter to get attention, and the more expensive the thing is, the better, because the Maui Jim sunglasses and the mortgage payment get a much larger reaction than just the shopping list. 

 Scout's entire body wags when his tail does, which is almost all the time.  Scout is maybe a little easier because he likes to play with toys and likes to chase balls, so it's possible to tire him out by throwing a ball in the backyard about a hundred times.  Scout likes to lay on his rug and hold a squeaky toy in his mouth and just squeak it.  In the winter, it's fun to throw his squeaky toys down the stairs and let him go get them.  It's sort of like a Stair Mill for dogs.  Scout's a little more adventurous than Chip -- he jumped into the hot tub twice before figuring out that that wasn't a good idea, and when we go hiking he likes to duck under fences to see what's on the other side.  I bring treats with me to call him back, and when he comes back he and Chip both get a treat.  Now, whenever Scout even gets close to the fence, Chip comes over to ask me for his treat.

Before I had my boys, I would see a sweet Golden Retriever walking down the road carrying its stuffed animal and think how cute that was.  We had to stop buying our guys stuffed animals.  When given one, they go in through the nose and rip out all of its stuffing.  It's a little scary.  The local pet store won't sell me the stuffed animals that are gauranteed to last anymore.  It takes Chip and Scout less than 30 seconds usually to completely eviscerate them.  It's not pretty.

I had lunch with a friend the other day, and as we were watching an adorable one year old eat it's lunch, she asked me if I missed having babies around.  "No," I answered.  "I still have two of them at home."

Labs come into your life as puppies, cute and sweet.  But even at 8 weeks old, they're serious trouble.  They're challenging and fun and happy and energetic.  It's a total cliche, but it's true:  they're overwhelmingly happy to see you every time you walk into the room, even if you were only gone for a moment to use the bathroom.  John Grogan may have made his millions writing about the antics of his lab, but I guess I don't really need the millions.  Just having the company of my boys makes me feel rich.  Okay, I do wish I had the millions, too.

One Year Update on Deeptone

The ads in the Rocky Mountain News show women transforming themselves into hotties.  It's the Deeptone One Hour per Week program, and I bought all of the hype and signed up over a year ago.  It's one of the hardest workouts in an hour that I've ever done.  I'm wiped out after it, and I gladly go to the evening class because that way I can go home and go straight to bed.  So what are my conclusions?

• After a year of doing Deeptone regularly, I've still stuck with it.  That's because it's, you know, One Hour per Week.
• There's no doubt that I'm way more toned, and I used to work out all the time before I joined.
• It's not a weightloss program, in spite of what they advertise.  You can work out for an hour a week, but you still have to watch what you put into your mouth.
• If I attend the class weekly, then I can definitely see improvement, both with my strength and flexibility.  But when I start missing classes, I can really only keep up and not improve.  I think that's because it's only an hour a week.  Missing one class is like missing your whole week's worth of workouts. 
• The instructors are great, they are concerned about quality, and they seem to have the right combination of being nice combined with being Jillian from The Biggest Loser.  We know that when they say, "No stopping till you faint or barf!" that they don't really mean it.  At least I think they don't.

In my opinion, there are two great things about Deeptone.  One is that it's only one hour a week.  The other is that it really does get results.  There's one lady in one of the classes that is 75 years old.  I hope that when I'm 75 years old, I will look as good as she does! 

Yoga Toes?

Last week I  blogged about the fact that I have now given myself plantar fasciitis.  What that means is that I can no longer run, for sure, but also that every step that I take includes with it a varying amount of pain.  When I went to see the podiatrist, the pain was up to about a 6 (on a scale of 1 to 10) on bad days.  Now, after a steroid shot and orthotics, I'm down to about a 4 at it's absolute worst, and really it's more like a 1 or 2 for the time that I'm on my feet.  Not bad, but not good, and it's hard to work out in any meaningful way since I used to work out by walking, hiking or running with the dogs.  Even with the plantar fasciitis, I still need to get my yellow labs out every day or else they will eat my house.  Literally.  Think Marley and Me.

I've been doing everything the doctor has said:  stretching the foot and calf, icing it when needed, taking mortrin, etc.  But there seems to be a direct correlation between the amount of time that I spend on my feet and how bad my foot hurts, and I haven't noticed that it's been getting better since about the time right before Christmas.  At Christmas, I did a bunch of baking, and being on my feet so much seemed to exacerbate the problem.  The peanut butter balls and double chocolate crinkles were totally worth the pain, though.

So what's a person to do when nothing works?  The answer is simple:  find a solution on the internet!  After all, isn't the internet a bastion of knowledge?  Everybody seems to be an expert on the internet, knowing WAY more than the doctors do.

And what did my meandering through every plantar fasciitis article find out?  The only real solution to my problem is with Yoga Toes!  Yay!  Finally, a product that will help me.  Here's what they look like:

They are designed to improve the strength and flexibility of my toes and the tendons that attach.  I just ordered them and I am hoping they arrive this week.

Of course, I am absolutely ignoring the fact that these days, people are actually paid to push a product on blogs and comments and the like in order to make it look like lots of people have tried and loved this product.  I choose to believe that Yoga Toes will work for me.  I'll blog about them in the future and let you know.

Looking Forward to 2009

2008 started off awesome for me.  I had joined Deeptone and Slim4Life, and I was in shape and feeling fit.  The kids were doing great, the dogs were settling in; by January of 2008, our youngest dog, Scout, was 9 months old and starting to turn into a real dog rather than a goofy puppy, so life was getting easier.

In July, though, as I've written about before, I broke my little toe.  I was hanging out at the indoors pool at the Broadmoor, and I slipped on some wet tile.  It was actually quite lucky that all I did was break the toe.  I remember starting to fall, and then all of the sudden I wasn't falling.  I had no memory of my foot impacting the railing, but that was the only thing that kept me from falling and either breaking a tailbone or, even worse, cracking my head against the tile.  So the broken toe was actually lucky!

Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to exercise with a broken toe.  Broken toes are really more annoying than anything, and I worked hard not to let it impact my life too much.  My swollen pinky toe wouldn't fit into regular shoes, so I wore flip flops the rest of the summer.  Two happy, energetic dogs, though, don't allow me to sit at home with my feet up for an entire summer, so I gamely flip-flopped around the dog trails.  The dogs could run, but it's hard to work up a sweat flip-flopping.  Not a lot of exercise there.

Most of the time when I walk the dogs, they trot by my side, especially during the summer when it's hot out.  They're pretty well-behaved, even when an entire contingent of people in wheelchairs passed us on East Boulder Creek Trail.  I was worried the dogs would lick the faces of the people and try to get in their laps, but overall the dogs behaved, and the people seemed pleased with the amount of attention the dogs gave them rather than annoyed.  But as soon as the dogs jump into the creek and back out again, they have this game they like to play where they chase each other at full speed, then one grabs the other's tail, and the two of them tumble, literally head over heels, still at full speed.  Usually when they zip past me, I would stand still and let them go.  Unfortunately, one day as we were flip-flopping at about the furthest point from my car at East Boulder Creek Trail, the dogs tumbled right into the back of my legs, dumping me on my butt and elbow.  I had to walk back the mile and a half with blood pouring down my elbow, while the dogs didn't seem to be a bit concerned about the entire episode.  Luckily, the elbow was only bruised, not broken, but it did impact my abilities to do Deeptone for a few weeks when combined with a broken toe.

Surely, at this point, there wasn't much else that could go wrong, was there?  I was actually feeling lucky still -- the broken toe could have been a broken tailbone, the bruised elbow could have been a broken elbow.  Things were looking up!  About three weeks later, I was heading down the steps of the deck to pick up the dog poop, and out of the blue a wasp stung me in the leg.  Lucky I'm not allergic, right?  It turned out you don't actually have to be allergic to these things, though.  Somehow, the one that got me was heinously poinsonous, and within a couple of days I had a maroon ring on my leg about 3 inches in diameter, and redness that literally spread in a 12 inch diameter.  You know it's bad when the doctor says, "Wow!" when he looks at it.  "That's really bad!" I think was his exact quote.

So a full round of Prendisone later, an elbow that had finally healed, and a toe that was mostly healed, I started back running, but I did so very responsibly, running a little at a time and building slowly.  When I had finally built up to three miles, feeling good, like maybe I had beaten back all of the crazy happenings, I developed plantar fasciitis.  For the uninitiated, it's not pleasant.  It's kind of like being back to the broken toe, but in the soft part of the foot where your heel meets your arch.

Now I am starting 2009 with orthotics in my shoes and hope that they will eventually cure the plantar fasciitis.  I don't think that's a full cure for all that ails me, though.  I'm pretty sure I need a good dose of luck.  I'm not superstitious, but if you see me with a four leaf clover or an old lucky shirt that hasn't been washed in ages, you'll know why.