First off, in case you haven’t noticed, I am female. I am (still) 45 years old. I am about 5’7″ tall. On January 2, 2012 I weighed 135lbs and my body fat percentage was 20.5%. This morning I weighed 132lbs so my BMI is about 20.67. When I am active, but my diet is a little off (meaning I drink more bottles of wine than is recommended and eat bonbons on a regular basis), this is where I tend to wind up. I gained 10lbs over the holidays… and have lost about 3 of that so far. Even though my BMI and my fat percentage are very similar they are NOT the same thing at all. Here’s a decent article that explains the difference between the two – and one of my favorite terms “skinny fat” – BMI vs Body Fat Percentage.

I am trying to get back to my happy place which is around 125lbs and 17-18% body fat. That is my goal – it is precise and measurable. At that weight I am happy with the way I look, I am strong enough to do what I want, and I don’t have that freaky “too lean” for a woman look. If I weigh less I start to become a weakling. If I weigh much more my husband starts using the term badonkadonk. Like most women on this planet, it is nearly impossible for me to get “big” or “bulky”. So any of you ladies who are afraid to lift heavy weights to get fit – please put that fear to rest, put down the 5lb dumbbells and go for something a bit heavier.

I weigh myself every day – I’m more interested in seeing how hormones and/or the salt content of a previous day’s menu add water weight than I am obsessing about a pound or two in either direction. One of my projects this year is to graph the fluctuations to see if I can make any rhyme or reason out of it. No, I do not have too much time on my hands. I only check my body fat percentage about once a month because it is a pain and I have to bribe my husband to take the measurements for me. I use a set of electronic calipers and a 7 site method for the calculation. It doesn’t change that much so there’s no point in doing it more frequently. I keep track of my measurements too – waist, hips, biceps, thighs etc and I take unflattering pictures to document where I am. Alas, that information I am not about to share.

As an aside, when I was thinking about this post I noticed something sort of odd. On blogs and websites where men write about their training they always-always-always tell you what their weight and body fat percentage is as well as how much weight they are lifting. Women on the other hand, even the really fit ones (except for one very petite powerlifter that I follow – Dana McMahan at It’s Always Going to Be Heavy) rarely do. What is up with that? Why is weight such a don’t ask don’t tell topic for women but not for men? Ah well, body image is always such a hornet’s nest for the females of our species. I wish it weren’t so. Be strong, be healthy, be proud of who you are and what you can do.

This is a picture of my gym. We’ve recently swapped out our bench with one that doesn’t have the bar stands. This means that I clearly have to be creative because I can’t load a bar heavily and do traditional squats or bench presses. The room was just too small for it anyway.

I subscribe to the premise that spending hours every day working out is futile. It is a waste of time. I can get just as good results by really paying attention to the types of exercises that I do. I only do complex whole body exercises for 3 sets at low reps. I do not just lift weights. I do “something” 6 days a week and maybe take a walk on or take off the 7th altogether. I lift 3 times per week, take a walk about 5 times a week, bike ride, run or climb on the stairmaster 2 times a week, and run wind sprints once a week (just. kill. me. now.). I am aerobically incompetent, but I try to do a little something anyhow. I also spent time statically stretching most days after my workout.

When I lift, there are four types of exercises that I do consistently. It takes me about 20-30 minutes to work out. I pick one from each category (usually two hip hinge ones) and maybe add a foo-foo exercise like dumbbell curls or tricep kickbacks for ha has. Those are also known as vanity exercises – they make one set of muscles look better but they don’t really build overall strength. If I don’t have the time, I drop those like a hot potato. I do not do any situps or crunches. My reps on each exercise range from a low of 3-5 when I have upped a weight to a high of 10 when I am ready to move up to a higher weight or I cannot up a weight due to my gym setup. Here’s the list of exercises that I do and the weights I currently use. I’ve taken some time off, so a number of these are below my goals. If there is a * it is limited by my gym setup, not my capabilities for that exercise. I do all of my weight lifting barefoot for range of motion and strengthening my feet.

• Push
  • bench press (2x35lb dumbbells *)
  • manly pushup (~15 reps/set)
  • incline press (2x25lb dumbbells)
  • military press (2x25lb dumbbells)
• Pull
  • pull-ups (body weight 2-3 reps/set)
  • bent over row (single arm (35lb dumbbell) or double arm (2x25lb dumbbell))
  • renegade rows (20lb dumbbell)
• Squat
  • back squat (50lb * – weak, I have to press the bar over my head to place it on my back)
  • front squat (2x25lb dumbbells – currently weak)
  • overhead squat (30lbs – this one is HARD)
  • split squat (2x25lb dumbbells)
  • push-press (2x20lb dumbbells – hate this exercise!)
• Deadlift/Hip Hinge Moves
  • standard deadlift (140lb barbell)
  • straight-legged deadlift (140lb barbell)
  • single leg deadlift (2x25lb dumbbells – this is a balance exercise)
  • dumbbell swings (single arm (25lb dumbbell), two arm (35lb dumbbell))
  • one arm dumbell snatches (25lb dumbbell)
• Foo-Foo or Vanity Exercises
  • dumbbell curl (2x25lb dumbbells)
  • dumbbell kickback (2x12lb dumbbells – why do I bother?)

That’s it, the kimono is open. I’m not super strong, but I am not playing with pink weights either.

I live in the conservative bible-belt. My home state rarely votes Democratic – except for Obama in 2008 we typically support the Republican presidential candidate. My vote rarely counts. There are times when I wonder why I even bother to cast my vote. Resistance is futile? I know, I know. I should just move back North to my YANKEE blue state home. F-that. Maybe somehow, someway I can make just a little bit of a difference.

Right now I live in a *very* conservative county. My county is poor – except for the island beaches – and most of the people who own beach property are part-time/second home non-residents. The average county household income is about $44,000 a year (2009). That’s nearly $20,000 a year less than the Raleigh area that I moved from. I won’t tell you what percentage that was of my household’s all time high salary… you just don’t want to know. My county still has an unemployment rate over 10%. Somehow, all this is a recipe for conservative politics. I can not even comprehend why. Why do the poorest states and the poorest counties think that they will be paying for socialist policies? Au contraire. They will be benefiting from them.

Let me tell you why I am a liberal.

I CARE.

I care about the people who have pre-existing medical conditions and who can’t afford medical insurance. I think that no one deserves to be bankrupt by their medical bills.  Yes Santorum, some people squander their health and clearly do not do the right things to maintain it. However, there are a lot of people (like me) who exercise every day, who eat healthy foods and who look like the picture of health who find out that they have developed a serious condition for unknown reasons. Maybe it is stress, maybe it was the environment, maybe it just happened… How can we deny healthcare to people who would benefit significantly from it? Let them die on the curb. I could not do that. Maybe socialized medicine would limit some choices, maybe it would slow things down a tad. Overall it would do society a greater good than allowing the one isolated individual who can afford their healthcare to benefit.

I care about animals – all of them. The gas chamber here kills more dogs and cats than I even want to think about. It is rumored to be more than any county in 3 states. That is so sad. Yes, it is a “liberal” agenda to charge more in dog license fees to register an unspayed or neutered dog. So what? How many of the puppies and kittens of those unfixed animals wind up in the pound and eventually in the gas chamber? I don’t want to know. Let’s make sure that our companion animals get the life that they deserve. We are all temporary residents on this planet created by who? God? The grand creator? Why should I have so many more rights to a decent life than my cat or your dog? A happy, loving home, a warm bed, a full belly. If we spay and neuter our pets the ones that remain have so much better of a chance to have that. People who treat their animals like property, like a coffee table or a ratty old couch that can just be discarded really disgust me.

I care about the environment. Drill baby drill. Really? Climate change is real. Turn your damn thermostat down, use less water and drive an efficient car and then let’s talk. My thermostat is at 66 during the day (upstairs… downstairs is only at 62) and 55 at night in the winter. In the summer I don’t venture below 78 degrees. We’ve put in dual flush low flow toilets. Now, on the subject of TMI – I don’t always flush. Seriously, does a 1/2 cup of pee need 1.6 gallons of flush? Shame on you – no it definitely DOES NOT. I once heard a quote that resonated with me “If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down.” I can understand needing a truck for work, I can not understand driving a Hummer as a status vehicle. My long-haul vehicle gets 32-35 mpg. It’s about twice as good as our pickup which we use for hauling things out of necessity.

I care enough to recycle.  Nothing makes me madder than folks who can’t bother to separate their recycling from their trash. Do you really think that we have an unlimited supply of aluminum for cans? Don’t you realize that it is cheaper to recycle a plastic bottle or a glass one for that matter than to create a new one from raw materials? Speaking of plastic – doesn’t it make you really upset to see sea animals trapped in plastic six pack holders or dead from ingesting pop tops or bottle caps? Yeah, it is just one fish or just one seabird or one otter, but how many do you think we get? I don’t want to be responsible for the next great extinction on this plant. Do you?

I care about people who love each other. Don’t you? They should be able to enjoy a life together with legal protections. Oh, you aren’t a man/woman couple? WHO CARES. If you care enough to hitch your little red wagon to someone else’s life you should be afforded the same benefits. Oh, that is totally disgusting – man on man or woman on woman! UH NO. That really doesn’t matter. I’m happy to stay out of your bedroom, provided you stay out of mine. If the conservative right thinks that they can police the sanctity of marriage they should be looking at making divorce illegal rather than preventing loving couples (of any gender) from sharing their lives. Besides, the gay population would totally get hammered by the marriage penalty…. I do not know a gay or lesbian couple where there is a stay-at-home spouse.  If you can’t wrap your head around the sanctity of marriage thing – consider this – it would raise a LOT more taxes which will help pay for the programs I am advocating.

Ah yes, now the lightning rod. Abortion. I am oh so thankful that I have never have had to make that choice. But I am grateful that it is a choice. I have never wanted children. I know that isn’t the norm. Most women want children, yearn for children, dream for children. Not me. I would be a terrible parent. I am happy that I would have the option for an abortion, though it would be an awful choice to make – and I am not sure that I could even do that. I am glad that a raped co-ed can make that choice. I am happy that an incest victim can make that choice. I am overjoyed that someone who would die bearing a child can make that choice. I am relieved that someone who would be a really terrible parent can make that choice.

I care about immigrants. This country became truly great on the backs of immigrants. My parents were immigrants – legal – but immigrants none-the-less. Why do we educate the cream of the crop of foreigners in our post graduate programs and then send them home when their education visas expire? These people can create businesses and jobs. These people are truly motivated – and they will help our country continue to be a leader in technology and business. Why are we sending them “home” where they will create those businesses in countries that compete with the USA? We should give them green cards. Heck, we should give them citizenship.

I care about people who worship differently.  I have friends who are Christian(evangelical and moderate), Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Agnostic, and Atheist. There’s probably a Buddhist in there too, but I can’t quite recall. I consider all of them to be good people. It’s not a matter of what your religion is, but of how you tread on this planet. Are you kind? Do you strive to connect with people who are different than you are and do you not try to change them? Every faith has been persecuted at some point in history. We need to take a step back and separate the person from the religion.

Ok, that’s all she wrote. Those are a lot of the reasons why I am a liberal. For better of worse I am an optimist. I think that we can make our society better by working together and accepting our differences. I don’t want you to change me, and I won’t try to change you.

Whatever you do – if you can – please keep an open mind. Maybe, just maybe that will make you a liberal just like me.

• Tweets – 68. (does anyone care? really?)
• Unique bird species identified this year – 65.
•  Books read – 37.
• Blog posts written – 26.
• New window blinds installed – 13.
• Nerf darts lost in the house, carried off by cats – 10.
• Pampas grass clumps removed – 3 , pickup truck loads to the dump – 6.
• Bedrooms painted – 5.
• Rooms with new hardwood floors – 4.
• Places lived – 3.
• Jobs quit – 2.
• Negative endoscopy results – 1. Priceless.

So far jumping off the hamster wheel of work has worked out pretty well for me. Let’s hope that 2012 brings more happiness and fulfillment.

Here is what the planting bed looked like when we first had it landscaped. Aren’t those plants cute?

Here’s another view from the upstairs deck. You can barely tell that there are two palm trees in there. The bushes all look lost.

After 6 years and the addition of a sago palm as an accent plant in the front of the bed, the picture isn’t as pretty. The bed closest to the street looks like this.

The one closer to the house is also a big disaster. Sometimes I think that landscapers should be shot. What was he thinking when he put that many plants into the beds? Either start with much bigger plants or warn the homeowner that half of them need to go!

Out came the bypass loppers, the pickax, the chainsaw and the shovel. The two palm trees were planted much too close together. The bigger one needed to move to the back of the bed, and the sago palm which is no longer the size of a tidy houseplant needed to be placed front and center. The variegated Golden Euonymus needed to be replanted. The crepe myrtle was invisible and had to be moved to the back yard. We have been hacking at those plants for years, but we never addressed the main problem – there were just too many of them out there!

I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to relocate a palm tree. I guess we waited too long. A friend of ours with a nursery said the trees have a small root ball and that they were “easy” to move. Easy is relative, he owns a bobcat. We dug them up by hand… and found out that the fire ant nest there that we thought we had killed was still active. JOY! That was a nasty surprise. Anyway, once we got the root balls dug, it became evident that two people couldn’t budge them an inch.

Why does gardening at the beach require tow straps and a pickup truck? I will never know. The long and short of it is that we had to drag the trees using the truck to their new homes. I wish I captured pictures of this endeavor. It was quite exciting!

In the end, the front island now looks much better. It is still awaiting some pansies and a thick coat of mulch for the winter, but it is almost done! I hope that we didn’t upset the palm trees too much with the relocation.

My mother taught me a lot about gardening. Until recently I never realized just how much. I don’t have the green thumb that my mother had, but I get by reasonably well.

Because of working in the garden with her, I can identify many plants by sight. If I can’t, I take it upon myself to figure out what the plant is and add it to my mental catalogue. This is obviously part of my data collection personality trait, but the love of gardening came from her.

The most important lesson that I learned about gardening from my mother did not have to do with how to cultivate plants or how to amend soil. What I learned is that a garden can only become a legacy if you share it. Every where that I have lived, my mom brought me plants from her garden to grow in mine. A lot of those plants have been left behind as I moved from place to place. My mother traded plants with a lot of her friends too. Plants are forever seeding themselves, or needing to be thinned out. If you let a garden get overgrown it will eventually die due to overcrowding. By sharing plants with friends you aren’t only helping their gardens become more interesting, you are also helping yours stay healthy.

Strangely, I find comfort in sharing my plants with friends. Most of the plants I share came from my mother’s garden which sadly is long gone. This is my way of keeping her legacy, and a little bit of my mother herself alive.

Some burgundy irises at my last house that my mom gave to me.

• Bill Gates – Microsoft is just a teeny part of his legacy, his real work is with the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.
• Steve Jobs – Elegance in engineering. Near perfection.
• Mother Theresa – Humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless.

I have to stop with this list or I will get totally discouraged. I know I should be inspired, but some of their contributions are so overwhelming that the little that I can do in my own backyard seems insignificant. It also can be hard to fit anything else into my day to day activities. I think most of us are in that boat. We live our insulated lives, we get up, brush our teeth and head off to work, we take care of our houses and our families and before we know it the day is done and we wake again another day to do it all over again. I’ve definitely had the strange feeling of living in the movie Groundhog Day. Here we go again…

I don’t want to keep living like that. So now what? I am, trying to figure out what I’ve done so far that has provided value and what I can do going forward that will make a difference. Being an introvert I could happily just sit in my chair and read books until I die, but to what end? Would that be a waste of life? It would bring me pleasure, but shouldn’t we all strive to make our society better in some way? Does it matter if it is big or small? I hope not.

That said, last week I made a mistake like this of epic proportions. I moved out of my house in Raleigh about 2.5 months ago… Well, somehow I managed to use my old address when I ordered something online. The funny part is that I used our new zip code, which is probably what got me through the billing address info for the credit card to be “ok”. Wow. I can’t say that I’ve ever done anything like that before.

I received an e-mail from the new homeowners last week letting me know that a package arrived for me at their house. OOPS! I went back and checked the receipt I printed out when I ordered, and sure enough, I botched the address royally. I guess some things just are indelibly burned into my working memory. It is pretty funny the number of things that happen on auto-pilot that we don’t even realize.

Thankfully I think that we managed develop a good relationship with the new owners of our old house through the buying/selling process. We loved that house, and we wanted the new folks to feel the same way, so we really did our best to make them feel at home. When we moved out, we left them a long note about the house, a bottle of wine, and we even left a whole stack of manuals and other information about the items installed in the house that sold with it. I hope my little transgression wasn’t too much of an inconvenience for them.

Late last Friday afternoon (after normal business hours) I received a call from Karen who was part of Time Warner’s collections group. She was wonderful to deal with and said that because of my experience, account auditing that uncovers equipment discrepancies after many years will be escalated and handled differently. I’m not sure how TWC is planning on changing their processes, but they agreed with me that it is unreasonable to expect a customer to keep a receipt for an equipment turn-in that happened years ago.

Whew! What a relief. I was so happy to hear that my dad’s account would not be charged. I was also very happy to hear this news before the weekend so I didn’t have to worry about it until the next business week.

This week I received written confirmation that my father’s account was in good standing and that the equipment charges would be waived. Thank you Time Warner Cable for doing the right thing.

I do worry however about those people in similar situations – not just with Time Warner – but with any vendor that provides equipment in the home. I think that most elderly people would just pay the bill because they wouldn’t have an advocate to push for them. I hope that when I’m getting old and frail that I have someone who will look out for me someday. Not having any kids makes that situation much more tenuous.

Two of our guest bedrooms are finished. They have hardwoods, they have been painted, the new blinds are hung and they have been furnished. The only thing missing is the artwork – still in storage. One bedroom has a king bed in it, the other has a queen. I won’t add pictures of them because they are pretty boring. It is hard to take good pictures of bedrooms. A third bedroom has hardwood floors and the trim has been painted. The fourth has 2/3′s of a floor installed so far. We made a lot of progress on the bedrooms.

The really really big news is that the new range has arrived! It was delivered on Tuesday. I felt sorry for the poor guys who had to carry it up two flights of stairs. These professional ranges weigh a ton.

Hubby did the gas hookup and after a couple of redos to make sure the range could be pushed back into place we finally were able to cook breakfast on it this morning! We had grits and home fries. Finally! I could actually cook in my pots and pans again instead of the microwave and an electric skillet.

Here is the final product! One big project is now finished. Between cutting out and re-doing some of the backsplash tile, replacing the duct work and hanging a new hood, ordering and waiting for the range and installing it – my kitchen is a lot closer to being finished. (last step… maybe a new fridge??)To compare it to what the kitchen used to look like click here.

Last but not least, the office is almost finished. YAY!
This turned out to be a bit of a one step forward two steps back process, but the bookshelf over the desk has been hung. If you look very closely in the picture you’ll notice that is “just fits” on the wall. This shelf was built years ago for a wall in our old house in Raleigh. It is within 1/16″ of the size of the space here. Amazing – it looks like it was made for the room. Too bad we had to tear off the moulding on two doors in order to have a chance to get it into its place. Now, we can finally take all of those boxes of books we’ve been shuffling around in the storage unit and put them in their rightful place on the bookshelf!

In a nutshell, that was our very productive week. It was awesome!

When I first signed up my dad for Cable TV they were running a special that required him to get a DVR. He didn’t need a DVR – and frankly we didn’t want him to get a DVR because with his dementia he could never figure it out. When that special offer ended we hastily traded that DVR in for a regular cable box. Over time, we downgraded his digital cable to regular cable because he just didn’t watch it much anyway. At that point a technician came to his room in assisted living and took back his cable box. This was about 2 YEARS ago. I vaguely remember being peeved at my dad for not getting a receipt for the box – but I also vaguely remember getting a receipt so I can’t say either way what really happened on those two transactions. It was a long time ago.

Fast forward to today. I got a call from “Tiffany” at Time Warner who claims that although the digital cable package was dropped from his account, his DVR(!!!) was never turned back in. Huh? When I mumbled something about probably having dropped it off, she replied – oh we don’t have a drop off location. Huh, that’s very odd. Every time I’ve tried to downgrade my service I’ve had to turn in a box BEFORE TWC would even consider adjusting my package. Now they’re just willy-nilly changing service without a tech coming to pick up a box? I highly doubt it.

“Tiffany” wants me to PROVE that we turned in the box by producing a receipt for it – or we’ll have to pay for it. I don’t know about you, but I go through my paperwork every year and shred things that don’t have long term tax implications. Sorry, TWC is not the IRS. Needless to say, that receipt probably has gone to the big shred box in the sky. The other option is that it is in storage with all of my other crap that hasn’t moved yet.

When I asked “Tiffany” how long I had to produce said receipt, she said I had a week. A WEEK??? Are you kidding me? It took you guys TWO YEARS to realize that your company didn’t properly close out the equipment for my dad’s account and I get one week to find ancient paperwork? I asked for two months and we got into a protracted argument that ended up with a 3 week time frame after I repeatedly asked to speak with her supervisor (which she refused!).

It gets better. I figured it would be impossible for me to find the receipt because of its age and the condition of our things in the move. So, I made the mistake of asking what we would be charged for this piece of equipment. $250 – $400! What the F@#$@#! That is about what my dad pays every month for his medications. Do I need to remind you that he’s on a small fixed income? “Tiffany”, I know that in your job you probably get measured by how many boxes you recover and how much additional revenue you generate, but sometimes you need to have some empathy.

He got this DVR in 2007, I’ll give TWC the benefit of the doubt that he actually got a new piece of equipment (HA!). It is at least 4 years old and in technology terms it is a piece of obsolete junk. Even if it is still used in their network the price should be reduced to its depreciated value. Funny thing is that equipment like this was probably depreciated by TWC within its first year of being in service. I highly doubt it has more than a 5 year depreciation schedule and that would be stretching things. Never mind that any company that can take immediate depreciation on equipment will do so – it is just good business sense.

I hate to say it, but most TWC installers that I’ve seen are contractors. I am sure that most of them are good honest upright folks. However, it would be one heck of a scam to take DVRs, not provide any documentation and resell them on ebay. Old folks in assisted living or nursing home facilities are the perfect target for something like this. Could this be what happened? I guess I’ll never know.

OK Time Warner – I have an idea for you regarding how you can find your DVR. This DVR has a MAC address associated with it – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to download software upgrades to it over your network. I’ve worked on Cable technology in a past life, I know… Why don’t you go out on your network and just disable it. I’m sure it will turn up through a service call sooner rather than later.

I know my dad enjoys watching TV, but I am probably going to cancel his TWC account. He has plenty of DVDs that he can watch instead. You might have won the battle, but in terms of long term recurring revenue you are about to lose the war unless someone in customer service will make this go away tomorrow. Heck, there’s a really good chance that you’ll lose my account too – and I pay for a lot more features than he does. As long as I can get high speed internet I don’t need cable TV anymore. In our move we got rid of all but 1 TV. It’s just not that important in our house.

Shame on you Time Warner Cable – stop picking on an old man. Since when are people in their 80′s with dementia a mark for corporations? It’s almost like dealing with a con man.

To see how this situation was resolved (YAY!), read this post: Social Media Saves the Day.