"I'm in training . . ."

It always seems like everyone's in training for something. Weight loss goals are breezily followed by "And then I'll be running a 5k . . ." or "running the such-and-such marathon . . ." or "hiking in the Andes with Juan, my personal trainer."

Leaving aside the obvious lack of a dashing personal trainer, I've decided to be "in training." I mean, why not? Sure, I can't breathe, my heart rate soars if I walk across the house too quickly, and I'm so out of shape that it's almost impossible to even ponder seeing my toes again, much less pounding them across twenty six miles of roadbed. But, hey, you have to have a goal, right?

So, I am officially "in training" for the Walt Disney World Marathon. In, umm . . . 2011? Wait, what year is that? Better make it 2012, to be safe. It's held in January, so, yeah, definitely 2012.

That will, not coincidentally, be about the time of Wales's 5th birthday. Not like I'd plan to go to WDW for anything but strict running opportunities or anything . . . .

Better

Starting to feel human again. I'm still breathing through goo, and things aren't perfect, but it's a lot better than it was a couple days back.

We began packing some things last night for the ReMove. The board games, two big boxes of toys that properly belong in the gameroom of our Texas house, but have been migrating through this gameroom-less house from closet to closet. Hubby has packed a few boxes of my books, but there are still two boxes waiting for topping off and taping-- we'll do that this evening, then stack them out of the way.

I never planned on moving back into our Texas house. There are so many things I'd have done differently if I'd known that it wouldn't sell. I wouldn't have painted the nursery back to plain beige. :-( It was beautiful with midnight blue ceilings and sky-blue walls painted with green hills. Now it's just . . . beige. Blah.

I would have left a lot of stuff in storage back in Texas, to save us the trouble of moving it all.

Ah well, we don't always plan these things, but we'll have to make the best of it. I'm going to try to get the china cabinet all cleared out and packed this week, along with the sideboard and the rest of the dining room stuff. If I can pack all the non-essential dishes, we'll be ahead of the game.

The closets are my next nightmare. They seem to multiply their contents by some strange magic. Surely we didn't buy THAT many pillowcases . . . .

Struggling . . .

. . . to breathe, mostly. The winter crud finally came home to roost in my lungs. I'd been hoping that the disease would give me a pass this year, since I spent six months fighting off chronic bronchitis LAST winter, but alas, it got me. I've been popping Tylenol and Sudafed and wishing I had something a little more effective. Being sick while pregnant pretty much eliminates all the good drug choices.

Hack, cough, sneeze. Blah.

I seem to be a little better today. Yesterday I had cold chills and was vomiting, too. Today I just can't hear out of my right ear and I'm trying not to move my neck too much, since the swollen lymph nodes just hurt when I do. Still really nauseated, but so far I've managed to keep my food down.

The baby's kicking has intensified, if anything. He hates it when I cough-- each coughing fit sends him into a fury of kicking. He probably thinks the roof is caving in, poor little guy.

Other than that . . . oh yeah. We're moving BACK to Texas, in March. I'll only be, what, eight months pregnant? No problem. Surely I can get this house packed up, get the kids all out of school, drag them halfway across the country, put them back in school, and then pop out a baby in time for Cinco de Mayo?

At some point in the future, I will probably look back at my childbearing years and just LAUGH until I pass out.

Pondering

Over the past two weeks, I've been wrestling with some problems and quandries and decisions that need to be made. Some of them have been fairly minor, some of them have been life-altering. What to do with this blog, well, it's a pretty minor decision. Whether to move halfway across the country from my husband, that's a major one.

Somehow, the decision-making process is just draining me of the last bits of energy I might have used to blog.

Ah well.

Reviving resolutions

So, delving back into the past, we find that I made at least one resolution or promise or vow or something: to read one of the Modern Library's Top 100 Novels per month, in order to finish them all before I turned 40.

I started off with gusto in June, reading during the long dull hours at work when there either actually was a tech to do the 15 minute safety checks on the patients or during those blessed rare nights when all of the patients only had hourly checks. I managed to read three novels in June and another in July. And, Lo!, all of them were enjoyable, if not exactly my typical reading fare. I'd previously read another nine of them, but I fully intended (and intend) to re-read them at some point.

But, for all intents and purposes, I only read four of the books, which makes me caught up on my resolution through . . . September? Egads. That leaves me lacking a novel for the past three months. I read plenty of novels during those months-- I had a gluttonous relationship with the local library in the previous town we lived in, and I caught myself up on all the genre fiction I'd missed during nursing school. I just didn't read anything off the list.

So, to recap: I read Henderson the Rain King, I, Claudius, The Way of All Flesh, and The Good Soldier. I recommend them all very highly. In fact, I'd say that reading each of them enriched my life in some manner. I think I've gotten a lot more out of the novels than I would have if, say, I'd tried to read them in high school. I just didn't have the perspective back them to appreciate the ironies and the griefs, the little triumphs and failings. I was much too dogmatic, on the whole. Not that I'm much better these days, but I try.

Somewhere along the way, I read another nine of them, but not in a very conscious and determined manner. So 1984, Lolita, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, The Grapes of Wrath, The Catcher in the Rye, A High Wind in Jamaica, and Heart of Darkness are all on the re-read list. Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" is on the re-read list as well, if only because I am 100% in love with that novel and re-reading it will be a pleasure.

Here, I officially admit what I did not admit during my junior year of high school-- yes, "Light in August" WAS assigned to me in AP English, yes, I turned in the final essay on the novel and passed the course with a B, but, no, I didn't read the book. And, honestly, unless Faulkner has somehow mutated into a less obnoxious pain in the butt to read, I doubt I ever will read that novel. Faulkner, ugh. Imagine the sound of a cat barfing. That's my internal reaction to Faulkner.

I've got a half-dozen or so of the other Top 100 Novels on a bookshelf, awaiting their turn. None of them have really called out to me, begging to be read. Nostromo, Wings of the Dove, Zuleika Dobson, Invisible Man, Brave New World . . . blah. Nothing feels right for the time and place. I've stared at my Amazon wish list for hours, trying to decide which of the other novels to shuffle over into my shopping cart.

Right now, I'm tempted to just splurge and buy a dozen of them. My dad sent me a gift card for Christmas . . . surely a hundred bucks worth of books is a good investment? Well, a hundred bucks worth of good books, anyway.

Tempting, very tempting . . . .

New Year, another go at this . . . .

I should probably stop making New Year resolutions.

Since I've been making them (twentyish years?), I haven't managed yet to actually keep them much past Martin Luther King Jr's holiday. Even before there was a holiday . . . .

So, with that in mind, I am refusing to make any real resolutions besides the resolution to keep the resolutions that I made LAST year. If I can remember them, anyway.

So, that leaves me back where I started last year, trying to maintain a weblog again. I deleted all the previous posts (all nine of them, representing two years of posting.) I'm starting fresh, trying to discover exactly what voice and style I do have in this new (post-apocalyptic?) era.

No guarantees. This may very well turn out to be disastrous!