St. Patrick's Day, Ma, Marc, Getting off my Butt

I can't believe it's Friday of march break already! It went by too fast.

I have a couple of things on my mind today.

St. Patrick's Day

First, yesterday was St. Patrick's Day. Normally on St. Patrick's Day, I think of my grandmother (Ma), who used to call SPD "my day". Her maiden name was Hennessey and she was of Irish extraction. I go the impression that SPD reminded her of her father, as she would often mention him in the same context.

I found myself thinking of Marc Rigby, as well. St. Patrick's Day was his favourite holiday after Christmas. He would take the day off work, along with anybody else he could convince and find an Irish Pub with good music and show up for opening. We went to Slainte in Hamilton many times. He would drink copious amounts of Guiness and sing his brains out. Typically we would stay until the bar closed - I would be the DD. The next morning, Marc would go to work as normal. I never saw him acknowledge a hangover.

The loss of a friend you don't see too often is hard to get one's head around. It doesn't affect my everyday life in the sense that he seems "missing" because he wasn't part of my daily life any more. But he comes to mind often. I'll be thinking about a menu for a dinner and need a specific recipe. I'll think to myself "I'll just email Marc, he has it" or "what was the name of that restaurant in Rome? Marc will know." And then it will hit me like cold water that he's gone.

When my grandparents died, I learned that "time DOES NOT, in fact, heal all wounds". Certainly the loss doesn't hurt any less. It seems to me that it just hurts less often. But on the occasions when the grief and loss surge, it hurts just as much.

Physical
One of my March Madness activities was to go to the doctor and get my yearly physical. I really like my new doctor. She actually talks to you like you are an intelligent human being and spends more than two minutes. I'm in overall excellent health except for one concern, which is that my blood pressure is a little high. We talked about it at length and decided that we might move on drugs eventually, but that for now, I was going to focus on diet and exercise.

Does it sound weird to say that I'm glad this little kick in the ass happened? I've been sitting on my butt since school started in September. My eating is excellent except for my after school snack. I'm ravinous when I get home and will eat anything and too much of it! So my eating strategy will be to have a protein smoothy when I get home, and to decrease the carbs in dinner slightly. That should make a significant difference, because otherwise, all I eat is lots of veg, a little low GI fruit and moderate amounts of protein.

It's exercise where I really need to make some changes. In other words, I have to do some! I decided to do a month of reconditioning - walking for two weeks, then walking and short weight workout for the next two weeks. After that I'll do a six month program - I have the precision nutrition exercise program for seven months, so I'll use that. I really like weight lifting, and will simply have to fit it in!

That's all for now.