This is the last week of my staycation and I am trying to savor every minute of it! Last Friday night we had free tickets to see The Pretenders at our local musical theater. I was not familiar with their music but went along with the husband. The opening act was led by Juliette Lewis who was in Melissa' Ethridge's music video, Come to my Window, she also played the disable sister in the movie, The Other Sister and has been in numerous movies. She left it all to join a rock and roll band. She reminded me of a female Mick Jagger the way she moved her body on stage. The music was so loud that it is hard to hear the words, so it all sort of sounded the same to me.

Krissie Hyde and The Pretenders are best known for their song, Chain Gang. It was an evening out, but I really did not enjoy the music because I was not familiar with it. It is always fun to go to a concert with hopes that they will play my favorite song, so when I don't have any, I get bored.

Sunday night we had tickets for Dar Williams for the 3rd time this year. I love her music and never tire of seeing her. She put on a great show singing many of my favorite songs!

The past couple of days have been hot and humid around here, just perfect to hang out in our backyard pool and relax! Just love being home when this weather hits so we can get the most out of our pool. We have had it for 21 years and I am so grateful it is still standing.

Today my "baby" turns 25 years old! Hard to believe how quickly the time flew by. He wanted to go to a very popular pizza spot a couple of towns away from here, so we took him to lunch there and came home and hopped into the pool. The rest of the family is coming tonight for birthday cake.

My kind of day!

Fashion Emergencies

I didn't mention that when I tried on my dress for the wedding that I noticed a small dark stain on the front of the dress. I only had the dress on for a few minutes and did nothing but walk up and down the hallway with my new shoes on. I don't see how I could have done anything to cause a stain, so I figured it was from the store. Without thinking I went and got a cloth with cold water and tried to get the stain out. Then I had a huge water mark on the dress that did not seem to be drying. So I put the dress in front of the fan and hoped that would do the trick. Well, sort of... most of the ring dried by now I had another spot that would not leave.

After a week of fretting about it, I brought it to a cleaner and when I took it in the girl at the front desk told me there was nothing they could do and I would just have to wear it or buy another dress. My heart sank. But after she went on and on discouraging me, she decided to get the guy from the back who actually cleans the clothes. (why could she not do this first off?) He examined the stain and smiled a big smile as he picked up the dress and whisked it away. I admit I was nervous as he just took the dress and did not ask my permission to work on it, but all was well, because he just steamed it out and it is a good as new!

I only have to put it on one more time before the wedding to have it hemmed. I am not used to all this fancy smancy and I feel so nervous around that dress!

The shoe situation did not pan out too well. The shoes that I got that everyone deemed perfect for the dress had heels that were too high for me. My knees felt like they were literally breaking in half and the muscles on my hips were pained. After looking around for weeks for something better, I brought them to the shoemaker for a little experiment. He is cutting down the heel to a height that I can handle on other shoes. We don't know for sure how this will work, but he thought it was possible that it would be good. I have no idea. I also have a back up pair of very plain low heeled shoes.

I am concerned how I am going to get through this wedding without orthotics. (I usually wear orthoics and sneakers or some other study tie shoe). I am planning to keep crutches and a pair of sneakers in the car for absolute crisis control and Ibuprofen every 4-6 hours to keep the pain at bay. I am also getting some lubricant shots in my knee starting in a week, so hopefully those will help. But I do have to worry about not doing more damage.

Perhaps I can dance like Paula does on American Idol. You know how she just gets up from her chair and wiggles around in place waving her hands in the air. I want to have some fun! After all, it is my son's wedding!

Staycation

It feels like summer has finally arrived and just in time for my stay at home vacation. I have enjoyed may hours in the backyard pool that did not even get opened until the middle of July because of all the rainy weather!

I am home catching up with every day stuff and up to my head with bridal shower and wedding plans. The wedding is in October and it is just around the corner. Time just flew by and all of a sudden I realized I needed to get cracking!

I am planning a bridal shower for my future daughter in law for Sept 12. I ran around yesterday to IKEA and Christmas Tree shops looking for cute little gifts that I could use as prizes at the shower. I have been searching on -line for shower favors and some simple shower games. One time I went to a shower where they just set a timer and every time the timer went off a gift went to the person whose present the bride was opening. That seems easy!

In the middle of all the business of wedding plans, I decided to become an AVON representative, so I am trying to get that business off of the ground. I have always enjoyed their products and my AVON rep was no longer in town, so instead of trying to find a new one, I decided to give it a go myself. I probably should have waited until after the wedding because it sure takes time to start up a new business, but I wasn't thinking about how much I would have on my plate. I am glad I did it and will just go at my own pace which is what it is all about.

And on top of all of that, my now retired husband took up painting a couple of years ago and has been getting very good at it. He brought his portfolio down to a local art gallery and the guy offered him the opportunity to have an art show! The opening night will be the night before the bridal shower! The gallery was looking to fill that date so he needed to go with the flow.

So between new businness/ shower/wedding/art show that are all happening at around the same time, we are crazy busy, but all fun and good energy happenings!

Boy, you're going to carry that weight a long time

I started to gain weight at the age of 5 from what I can tell from my childhood pictures. I have never been a "normal" size since then, but have fluctuated a great deal over the years. I can't say I have tried every diet under the sun, because in most cases I wasn't interested in dieting. I know that sounds crazy considering what I just stated about myself, but I always felt I would do it "myself". I believed that there was a deep and dark unconscious reason for why I had weight issues. I thought if I had enough therapy and dug deep enough into my psyche I would experience that one ultimate light bulb moment that would free me from this affliction and the weight would melt off of me.

Well, I have had many breakthroughs regarding this issue and while sometimes it led me to manage my weight issues successfully, it did not last for long. Never long enough to get to"normal".

I never really understood what the word bullying meant when I was growing up and it wasn't until recently with all the attention of anti-bullying programs in schools that I came to terms with how much I was bullied as a youngster.

I have been slapped at the dinner table by "well meaning" relatives for taking too much food as a child, I have had obscenities yelled at me from passing cars as a teen-ager, and I was always made fun of in gym class when the nurse would broadcast our weight in front of everyone on weigh days. I was too passive and too much of a nice girl who followed all the rules to ever skip school on those gym days, or ever tell some one off, so I swallowed it all and then would eat over it. It became a cycle for me.

When I did begin to lose weight, people would make a really big deal out of it. I hated the attention. It always made me feel angry and sometimes full of rage to be complimented on my weight loss. I don't know exactly what the anger is about, and I would become so mad that I would just stop trying to lose. I know, I know, it only hurt me in the end. But I still have some of those feelings in me as well as many growing feelings of shame.

A few years back I was walking regularly and watching what I ate and I felt like I was on the right track. I even walked a 5 Mile K with the Oprah show (they filmed a walk in CT one year) when she was doing her whole theme on Moving with Oprah. But then all my feet and knee issues developed. I haven't been able to be as active and over the last few years I just gave up trying. I went back to many bad habits.

I thought my son's wedding would be motivating for me, but it hasn't. But these are my issues and I know there are many people out there who suffer from food addiction like I have all these years. I was very successful in Overeaters' Anonymous years ago, but lost motivation for that.

So that said, I am here to say that for me, I don't enjoy when people comment on my weight loss. I have been trying to be more active now that our pool is open and trying to control my food to get myself ready to make a commitment to myself. The other day at work someone asked me if I lost weight. As soon as I hear those words l feel the anger start to well up inside of me. Maybe it is just the anger of feeling so judged and ridiculed all those years growing up. I am afraid of what may come out of my mouth. But I try to be polite and also just brush it off. But she kept going on about it, now yelling about it across the yard. I just turned away and went inside. I know it was rude to do, but I was totally embarrassed. I was hoping she would not come after me and make it a bigger deal, but thank fully she did not.

I know lots of people especially women want to go on and on and complain about their bodies and their weight and society is more focused on it more than ever before. Most women enjoy being told they look thin or lost weight. Not me. I usually try to change the subject. Sometimes I avoid social situations when I know certain women will be there, the ones who think they have a weight problem and go on and on about it.

So I decided to try to write about it some. This is a huge for me to be posting a blog about something so personal and painful to me, but I know it is time to try to break through these barriers. I can't live like this anymore on so many levels.

John Lennon/Michael Jackson

On December 8, 1980 John Lennon was assassinated. I won't ever forget that day for many reasons. The first reason is that date is my husband's birthday. Another reason is that on the morning of Dec. 8, 1980 I woke up to the news on my clock radio. My eyes flew open when I heard the news and then I quickly closed them tight hoping to go back to sleep so I did not have to deal with the horrifying news.

After a few minutes, my husband whispered to me asking me if I was awake and knowing I had to face the shock, I told him I was awake and I heard the news, but I wanted to go back to sleep and pretend it didn't happen. I later remember sitting on the top of the stairs in our apartment and crying my eyes out. I did not understand why I was so emotional and how could I feel so strongly about a man that I had never met?

Later that day an older woman that I was friendly with called me to chat and when I spoke to her she immediately recognized that I was upset. She said that she had been listening to the news and saw all the Beatle fans on TV who were so distraught because of John's death. She said she dismissed them as silly and childish. But she knew me. I was a mature young woman with a new baby and if I was feeling so upset about John's passing then she felt that she had to rethink her opinion and try to understand.

All I knew is that I loved the Beatles since I was 11 years old, Paul was my favorite, and I was devastated that John had died. The Beatles music was the soundtrack of my life and I felt I had grown up with all of them, even though I never met them. Their impact on the culture and music was unsurpassed at that time.

I turned the news on that evening just to see if it would be mentioned on TV and low and behold, Walter Cronkite opened the CBS Evening News with the the story of a man and his guitar. It was then I knew that all that I was feeling was much bigger than myself.

The news of Michael Jackson's death has had me reflecting back to that day in 1980 when John died under those tragic circumstances. I first read on the Internet that Michael Jackson was in the hospital, then I took a ride down the street to the store. As I came home and got out of my vehicle, a car passed on my street playing Michael Jackson music, really loud. I knew at that moment that Michael was dead. I understood the outpouring from the fans, as I had experienced that so many years ago when John died.

I never considered myself a big Michael fan. When he as at his height, I was a married woman and working mom going to school and raising two young boys. I totally forgot that I actually owned the Thriller album, until I started hearing all of the old Jackson songs playing after Michael died. I was a fan and didn't even realize it.

I was a Top 40 girl and I have always loved music. When I liked a song or an album, I would sit by the record player and learn the words by heart and teach myself every lick. So that is what I did with the Thriller album as well. It was also a new age of MTV and I loved watching the videos and was drawn in by Michael's dancing. My sons were at the age where they were paying attention to what was going on in the pop world and they enjoyed the music and videos as well. A relative gave my son the Michael Jackson doll. When the song, "We are the World" came out I used to play it every day before work for inspiration. I had forgotten all about those times, they seem so very long ago.

The memories came flooding back to me as I watched the coverage of Michael's death and began to feel something. Again, feeling sad over a man I never met and concerned for his children that I don't even know.

Back in 1980 when John died, Yoko Ono, his wife called for 10 minutes of silence to honor John Lennon. I clearly remember thinking about how I wanted to spend those 10 minutes. I decided I wanted to spend it walking up the hill of my family's farm, my favorite place in the whole world. My husband and I took that 10 minute walk in silence, while all the TV and radio stations went off the air for 10 minutes. It was unheard of.

I had to work today, so I could not watch the MJ memorial service live. I actually hadn't given much thought to watching it, but when I came home I put the TV on right away only to catch the heart wrenching ending with his daughter Paris. Since then I have been watching all of the highlights on TV and will be glued to them for the evening. What an outstanding line up of performances, what a dignified and respectful service. I hope they repeat it in its entirety, as I am sorry I missed it.

It seems to me that nothing connects people together more than music. Music is a prayer. And where there is music, there is healing.

Weekend over

Nothing is better than a summer evening at home and hanging out in the back yard. Tonight I raked up the twigs under our huge oak tree and then the husband and I played some badminton. The yard was freshly mowed and smelling great. The cat was outside with us following us around like she was a dog. I love when she hangs out with us outside. It is a comforting feeling for some reason.

I had been waiting for this weekend for forever it seems. I so enjoyed the long, lazy three day weekend, but now it seems to have gone by way too fast. Friday night I went to the movies to see "UP" the new Disney movie. I loved the beginning of it, but got bored with the rest. The animation (or what ever they call it) was fantastic, it is amazing what they can do. The beginning of the story was so sad, but then for me the plot fizzled out. There wasn't really anything else my girlfriend and I wanted to see, so that was that.

The husband and I had nothing planned for the weekend and just caught up around the house, went to dinner, and visited with our families.

I am watching my Sunday night show, Looking for the Next Food Network star, then ironing and getting ready for the work week.

They say it's your birthday

It was my birthday on Wednesday, July 1. I have always been happy to have a summer birthday. We are usually away on Cape Cod for my birthday, but this year we didn't rent a place and I was home.

It was sort of a double celebration as it was the first day of my husband's early retirement. I took the day off from work and we spent the day together. We went to the beautiful CT hills and took photos, had a quiet lunch, and poked around in antique stores. Later we came home and my husband baked a cake and my sons and future daughter in law came over to spend the evening with me.

When I arrived home from our outing flowers were being delivered to me from my job. The are just beautiful. Big lilies and roses with a very nice note letting me know that they appreciate me. If that wasn't enough, they also gave me a generous gift certificate for dinner at an Italian restaurant in town the next day.

My husband surprised me with a new laptop! My old one was falling apart and barely usable. I am hoping to get back to blogging now that I have this new machine to work with. The kids all chipped in and got me tickets to see Kathy Griffin. She makes me laugh, even with her foul language. I would never spend the money to buy myself tickets to see her in person, but the kids figured I would be pleased to get the tickets. And right they were!

Family and work all made my birthday very special. At times I felt overwhelmed with everyone's generosity, but I sure appreciated it. It is nice to have a day to feel special. Most of all I am feeling very grateful to be able to say that I am another year older! I will never complain about birthdays, I love my birthday and I hope they just keep on coming!!