The Mouse will Play

When my husband is around I eat three meals a day at regular times, on a schedule he likes to follow, get up and go to bed ditto, and plan my week around his plans and my meeting list. When he is away, as he has been this week, it is quite an indulgence not to work or eat to a plan. I have been working away at losing some weight, and tried out the 'only eat when you are hungry' method this week. I dropped about a pound and a half - hope it stays off - and passed a benchmark.

On Thursdays I go to a line dancing class. This Thursday I was running late so I grabbed out a pair of cords that just came out of summer storage, threw them on (well, with other clothes, yes) and hurried to my class. About half way through, I tripped on the hem of the pants and realized that they are loose enough around the waist that they had slipped down and the hems were trailing on the floor. I guess I am going to have to wear a belt - and that my belts might even go around me again. Benchmark. Ta da!

The line dancing class is a lot of fun. Our instructor is a Francophone woman with a great sense of humour and an equally great love of country music and Anne Murray. Yesterday we learned a longish series of steps (she paces out the pattern, we practice it and then she puts fairly slow music on and we do the steps. If we have the pattern down, we get faster music and do it again. Yesterday, with a big grin, she told us that the music was really fast. And it was. Luckily, this was not the place where my pants slipped down or they would still be scraping me off the church hall floor. We were all groaning at the end of the class, but they were good groans.

My feet are going to cost me a lot of money. I spent my childhood and youth in swimming pools, ending up as a swimming instructor, and along the way I acquired toenail fungus, big time. My doctor and chiropodist have both worked on the fungus, but the best they could do has not eradicated it. That and the fashion for pointy toed shoes (and my vanity) as a young woman have made a real mess of my toenails. And it is no longer possible to cut them properly on my own. So I booked an appointment with a podiatrist. I am going to have four nails surgically removed at a fairly steep price, but this guy also xrayed my feet, was most dismayed at the results and is urging me to get orthotic insoles. Also expensive. JG says I should have expected this as they sell the orthotics, but I will try almost anything that will improve my ability to walk distances. My credit card was steaming when I walked out of there. And I will have to wear lace-up sports shoes. Snarl. I guess vanity is not yet dead in me.

Why is it that my toenails and the floor are a lot farther away than they used to be. And gravity is heavier. I'm in another photo group and the prompt for this last week has been 'up from below'. I thought of one very interesting thing to do, but it requires me to lie on my back on the living room floor and getting up from there is not simple. Nothing to hang on to. I watch Herself effortlessly swing her feet up over her head and pull herself up into a tree, and remember when I used to be able to do that. Herself was amused to tell me that she and her daddy went to the park and he tried to pull himself up into a tree the same way and, she giggled, got stuck. Kids can be really hard-hearted sometimes.

My week of no schedule is over and I must now make the house look as if it has been lived in. I did remove almost eight pounds of surplus paper from my office. Having a baby of the same weight did not take as long.