Ending on a good note.

Four wonderful and or exciting things have happened in the last two days. MY AEROBICS DVD IS HERE!!! Can you say home made? But that’s okay because the show was never put out on DVD, not even sure about video for that matter. So I have two DVD’s and eight episodes. Woot!

And .. remember my old man cat Riley going to the vet and having blood work done? Yeah, so he is in the early stages of hyperthyroidism which is not unusual for a cat his age. I was given medication for him but I am also trying something else. I consulted with Holly, over at A Spiritual Dog Blog, about treating Riley with herbs. She has been studying and working really hard to gain the knowledge to treat animals holistically with Chinese herbs. Her business is taking off – she’s very busy these days but she put together an herbal formula based on Riley’s symptoms and age, etc, and got it to me in like 2 days. I have her button on my side bar; have a look. I am so happy for her success and grateful for her help with Riley! Thank you Holly!

At the end of last year sometime I wrote about Andy Clary, a friend from 25 years ago asking – does anyone know where he is?? I have seen some Google searches for the name, but no one has ever contacted me until this morning. An old friend of one of Andy’s sisters emailed me to say she doesn’t know directly where Andy is now but she does run into his sister from time to time and will try to help me make the connection if she can. I was thrilled to get that email – it’s the closest I’ve come to finding Andy again so it’s exciting! And I thank Deb for making my day!

Speaking of making my day .. ! Thursday night I couldn’t sleep. At.all. Consequently, going to work yesterday morning was brutal. I do not function well without any sleep so was not nearly as productive at my job as I would have liked to be and it was a very long day. So it was a wonderful surprise at the end of my work day to get a phone call from my BF that he was outside waiting for me. I packed up my laptop and lunchbox, grabbed my purse and my jacket and keys … it never ends. Anyway, I went outside to my car and opened the door to put all my baggage inside – and a glorious smell wafted out. There was a water bottle with lilacs in it sitting in one of my cup holders! I had mentioned seeing some as I was waiting for a red light the other day and he remembered and surprised me with some he followed his nose to find. And then he was beside me to seal it with a kiss. Sigh-h. And the picture? My lilacs are sitting next to the roses my BF gave me earlier in the week.

I know, right?

*

**Edited to add- I just realized by the picture and what I wrote, it almost looks like Holly treats mostly cats. But the flipside of that card has a picture of a dog on it! I would venture to guess she treats more dogs than cats but can obviously do both. Don't want any dog owners to be discouraged!

I need to find my leg warmers

Does anybody remember this? The 20 minute workout? It was an exercise show in the 80’s. It was permed hair and “let’s get physical” workout clothes. It may have been one of the first aerobic workout shows on TV. I had just had Andy, my first child, in 1984. This show was a big part of my losing the baby weight. It was hardcore for someone not athletic like me, and I didn’t have to have the coordination of a choreographer to do it.

At least that’s how I remember it.

The show was on at something like 5:00 a.m. so I’m not sure how I found it, but when I discovered there was no way I was going to get up at that hour to exercise – I taped as many episodes as I could and would do it later in the day. Because we had bought our first ($700.00) VCR. Yes, you read that right. They were expensive back then. Or possibly my ex-husband told me that’s what he spent the money on, but anyway .. !

There wasn’t a single person who was the star, from episode to episode there would be different women leading the work out for that day. There were always other women doing the routine with her and managing to look gorgeous all the way through.

I had not seen anything of the show since the 80’s and trying to find it on the internet now, I was in for some surprises.

I do not remember the way it was shot and the makeup and spandex looking anything like porn back then. There were a lot of shots of women from above looking down on them as they bent over and touched their forearms to the floor and bounced, bounced, bounced. Again shooting from above there was always at least one girl who would make that eye contact with the camera as she slowly did the cool down, raising her arms over her head and looking up as she did so.

It was shot ‘in the round’ basically; it had to be the camera going around the girls because they couldn’t have been working that hard on a moving platform. But the camera angles allowed you to see every exercise from all the angles you would want or need to. Now I kind of wonder how many guys watched it for a completely different reason than I did!

I will say that looking at it now, the stills look worse than the video, but I just didn’t see it as super sexy back then. Was I that naïve? Or did I just want to get into shape that bad?

All I remember was looking at those women and thinking what perfect bodies they had, and how badly I wanted to look like them. There were no fake boobs on that show either, just pretty, very well toned women.

Exercise and I are not friends. There have been times in my life where I got into a good routine and worked out on a regular basis, and sometimes it lasted quite a while. But I’ve always stopped. And for a long time I’ve thought – man – that show ought to come back – I loved that show! I would exercise if I had that show to motivate me!

Uh huh.

I decided to try to find it and it was very difficult. I finally found a 2 DVD set with 8 episodes on – where else – eBay. Of course I bought it and it’s on its way. Either I will kill myself trying to do the work out I did literally 20 years ago, or I will give myself a break and alter it until I can catch up.

Or, I will remind myself that when I did that work out I was 25 years old, didn’t have any plates or screws in my ankle, and no cats to trip over, and plop down on the couch with a tub of caramel corn and a creme soda and watch my daughter do it. She is SO going to laugh when she sees the hair and outfits. If nothing else – it will be good for a chuckle!

This video is 10 minutes long, but at least have a peek. I know you'll want to go dig out some sweat bands and leotards and get going! Or not. But it IS worth a look.

Admit it. You SO want to get physical now, don't you?

Spiders, June bugs and memory dumps

So I am up and running again. I did one of those – I’ll wait till later and try to turn it on again, as if waiting 2 hours is going to make a difference. Except it did. Hmmm. My fan has been running loudly and non-stop for a while now. It has been suggested that my laptop is over heating. I guess that’s a possibility.

I vacuumed any vent I could see hoping to suck any dust and or cat hair out of there. Don’t know if that helped or just letting it completely cool down did. The error I’ve gotten twice in the last few days was scary, Windows just shutting down and giving me the blue screen. “Beginning memory dump.” WHAT??? “Memory dump complete.” Argh-h-h. (see Shelagh? Even my computer says it took a dump!!) :)

After that one I did what I would normally do – look the error up on the internet! Found the only real suggestion I could do was a scan disk, essentially, and to load Microsoft’s newest service pack. I was also advised to make sure that anything new I may have installed, is installed properly. Well how am I supposed to know that?

I’ve never seen a program pop up and say “just a friendly note to let you know I’m not installed properly.” No, I get things that say “A disk read error has occurred” Uh huh, what’s that? And when I try ctrl+alt+delete to restart a couple of times, I get another message “No bootable devices – strike F1 … yada yada yada.” And then … No boot device available – internal hard drive ..” It all sounds so bad.

But – it came back up, slowly, told me it had recovered from a serious error which I found absurd but – okay. So I’ve had my computer going down and back up again and giving me strange messages. I had ants in my kitchen today and what I didn’t mention earlier is that I could not get my oven to work and my toaster oven decided to toast only from the bottom now. Yay. How many strikes do you get in one day??

A little while ago I hopped in my car with a raging headache to drop a package at the post office. Leaving the house the wind was starting to gust and I felt a web go across my face as I stepped off the porch. I hate that! You don’t see the spider but you know he’s there. Watching you. Ee-e-w-w. And what was gracing the window next to the door as well as on the screen on the door? Yeah, June bugs. They’re close, it’s getting toward the end of may. They are a lot darker this year for some reason, makes them even creepier.

I may hate the beetles but they make for some good clean fun for Abby, she’d love it if one of them actually got in the house. At least she thinks so. In reality my cats rarely know what to do with a bug other than bat at it till it just gives up and dies and they lose interest. Jake is usually the only one who will actually chase one and eat it.

Click on the picture to better view the bugs. Ick.

Anyway, now I am at my computer – using a chill mat of my son's that he had but had never opened. And really, the bottom of my laptop is much cooler to the touch. So we are alive again, whether or not it is temporary remains to be seen. I’m hoping for a better and more productive day tomorrow without a major headache or computer problems. And ants, I don’t want anymore ants. Blech-h-h.

**Edited to add - Try the daily jigsaw on the right sidebar! I actually have a jigsaw program on my desktop and I find it very relaxing to do one or two now and again, so I had to try this widget when I found it.

Suffering

I am horribly dependent on my computer. Attached would not even begin to cover it. The last couple of days I have been getting errors of impending doom, a few blue screen of death errors and today, well, I am posting from my daughter's computer. Hi Dani! She is not home.


Today apparently I have no bootable devices. Sigh-h-h. So, if I am not visiting or commenting or even posting as much as usual, that would be why.


Oh and then - right after my laptop took a dump I went into the kitchen to throw something in the garbage and saw these black splotches on the floor. I had to get my glasses to see the splotches were ants. Freaking ants! Not very bright ants either. This house is on a slab and when we get a lot of rain like we did last night the ants decide that INSIDE is where they need to get out of the rain. So there was a trail of ants from the side door to in front of the garbage cabinet. They were all milling around a crumb or 2 not 3 feet away from cat food left over from kitty breakfast. ??? Fighting over crumbs while a veritable ant feast sat a few feet away.


The ants picked a bad time to mess with me. They are all very dead, the kitty food is in the garbage and my computer sits abandoned. Sounds like a really good time to take a nap.


Hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day without any ants or dead boot devices!

I should change the name.

This is the risk she takes when my daughter comes home from school and does not put her belongings out of the reach of the cats.

To them it's a new opportunity to nest.