Archive of ‘Books’ category

Running Announcement

Read the first part of my US Open recap here.

Since the rest of my recap is moot now that the Open is over and Federer lost, I will quickly show you some pictures I took:

US Open view US Open

US Open federer US Open federer 2

Ahh. Nice. I will spare you the photos of Federer sitting in his chair on the side of the court.

I am excited to go back next year on a weekend and have more time to walk around and see side matches and maybe not freeze like I did this year, and maybe get to stay for the entire thing and not have to leave early since the game goes on past midnight.

🙂

Some randomness going on in my life these days:

I took a free memoir writing class at Gotham Writers’ Workshop last night and basically fell in love. I learned some great things in just that one hour and, as they hoped when offering these free classes, I now am obsessed with the idea of taking a full workshop. Sara Barron, who wrote a hilarious book that I love called People are Unappealing, teaches the comedy writing workshop. The only thing that is stopping me from signing up right now is money. It’s not even expensive at all for what it is, they offer fantastic prices there. But, it is still more than I can swing right now. There is a one day full-day course of the same topic I could take, but I have to go to a wedding on that day. Maybe in the Spring I will take a workshop. For now, I am excited for anything free they offer — including the free Dialogue Writing class I am taking next week!

Expect to see more dialogue in this blog after that.

I am reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma and I am finally getting to the good stuff. It took me awhile to get past the history of corn but I hope to have a full review of this along with In Defense of Food for you within the next few weeks.

For the longest time I didn’t understand Twitter but now that I started to actually use it and understand it better, I LOVE IT. I think Twitter just might be my favorite of the social networking sites. I love how information is immediate and accessible and how you can feel like you are friends with celebrities or companies with it. I feel like Jill Zarin and the guy who played Kryten in Red Dwarf are speaking only to me when they tweet.

Confession: Although I strive to live a healthy lifestyle, I have one dirty little secret. That secret is bread pudding from the dessert bar at Whole Foods. HOLY YUM that stuff is amazing. Amazing to the point where every time I am at Whole Foods by the buffet I can’t NOT get a little bit. And the confession gets worse . . . I usually go to Whole Foods on my way into work in te morning. I usually have a tiny bit of bread pudding for breakfast multiple times a week. 😐 The best days are when it is extra mushy, like pure pieces of mush. Those are days it really melts in your mouth. Bread pudding is dessert french toast. I even complimented the dessert chef at the TriBeCa Whole Foods personally. Whole Foods is evil.

My old blog template did not support bulletpoints for some reason. They just wouldn’t work, even if I manually typed in the code. That resulted in some stupid looking blogs. I was excited to realize in this post that I do have use of bulletpoints, but I found out today I am unable to make spaces between each bullet. My point is, expect to see more bullets but not as many as I’d hoped, and not when I have paragraphs to bullet.

And finally, my running announcement. As you might know, I am very new to running. I wanted to do it and then couldn’t — I had knee pain, hip pain, felt overall awful when I tried. At one point I said “running is just not for me.” And then I tried again and ran for 25 minutes and felt pretty good. Ever since then I have been slowly and steadily improving, and over the last weeks I ran two 5K races (here and here). Well, as some of you predicted, I have officially caught the racing bug. All I want to do is run in more races, and I am already dreading the winter (treadmill, blech) and looking forward to the spring when I can know I will have months of outdoor running and races.But — race season is not over yet! And after some research I decided to register for two more races this year! On September 26, I will run in the Continental Airlines 5th Avenue Mile, a 1 mile timed race that begins on 80th and 5th and runs right alongside Central Park to 60th and 5th, just a few blocks from my apartment. I am excited to push myself hard in a short run to see how I do!

I wanted to challenge myself in a longer run as well, as I have never run more than about 3 and a half miles at a time. So the next race I signed up for is the Poland Spring Marathon Kickoff, a 5 mile timed race in Central Park on October 25 that ends at the same finish line as the NYC Marathon! I have never ran 5 miles before so this will be a real challenge. I created a training schedule loosely based off Hal Higdon’s 10K Novice training plan, which I am attempting to follow as best I can. It hasn’t been so spot on, but I am doing my best and as long as I get my long runs in I will be fine.

Have any of you ever tried something you never thought you’d do and ended up getting really into it?

I am so excited!

Pain Pain Go Away, Come Again Another Day

In last week’s BeamGreen post, I forgot to show you the pictures of Stogo ice cream with my Babycakes cookie!

     Stogo 2

Okay, all better.

Anyway, I had great plans for this weekend and none of them worked out. You would think that after being in constant pain for a year and a half and semi constant pain for 6 months, I would know what medicine to take to stop said pain.

I don’t.

My second GI doctor has given me a number of pain meds. None of them worked. And any doctor I saw following that one warned me to never take any of those meds anyway, as they will cause the underlying problem to become worse. That same doctor also gave me Vicodin, which the following doctors also warned would contribute to the problem getting worse. Although when the pain is bad enough and the others don’t work, that is the one I’d turn to.

So the problem is — if the pain meds I have don’t work and make the underlying problem worse, then what can I take when I am in pain?

I have trying to find out this answer for a very long time. Unfortunately, if such a medication exists for my pain, no doctor I have met with knows about it. I just called my newest doctor and left a message for her to call me back about this. This is because I have been in pain for days now.

Last week I was having a pretty great week, stomach-wise. Monday – Friday all was pretty good. On Saturday, I woke up lethargic and spent the entire day napping. At the height of my GI problems I was constantly lethargic, and now that I am better at handling my situation it has not been so bad. But on Saturday I was just out of it. I was also not able to eat much, which didn’t stop me from eating much at a barbecue at the boy’s family on Saturday. When the food is there . . .

So it is probably no surprise that I woke up on Sunday unable to move. The pain was sharp and the pain was pressure. It felt like little people are punching me all over. My plans to run didn’t happen. My plans to go to Missy’s sister’s wedding didn’t happen. I didn’t leave the apartment all day. I just laid around saying ow and reading books.

The books I read:
Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool by Hannah Friedman
Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood by Julie Gregory
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

All the above books were great.

And I just started Born to Run:  A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seenby Christopher McDougall — anyone read this? I am so excited about it!

Born to Run

The boy read it and made a unique in response to what he read. He will be writing a guest post soon all about it.

As you can see, I was on a major memoir kick. And I still am. After I finish Born to Run I have two more memoirs I want to get to, including Dumbfounded: Big Money. Big Hair. Big Problems. Or Why Having It All Isn’t for Sissies by Matt Rothschild.

Anyway. I thought for sure I would be fine by Monday morning. So I laid out all my running gear, excited for the perfect weather that they were predicting. I calibrated my Nike + iPod last week and was excited to get a more accurate idea of how far my run is and how fast I run. I set my alarm for 6:00 and went to bed early.

When my alarm went off, all I felt was pain. Intense pain, worse than Sunday’s. It hurt so much. I tried to picture myself running and my vision included lots of pain and going slow and being upset. I knew getting out of bed was not an option. I went back to sleep and had a dream that I was running in a strange marathon that included stops all over and talking to lots of people and going to all these places inside other places. I woke up every now and then to groan in pain and wonder how I would go to work. I considered working from home.

At a little after 7:00, I finally forced myself out of bed. Once I started moving around, the pain wasn’t as bad, but I still keep feeling intense stabs. And it still feels like someone is punching me. Which sucks, because when I went outside the weather really was perfect.

I hope I will be better for tomorrow morning. I want to run in this weather, I want to not be in pain. I want my doctor to call back with some suggestion for what I can take.

What is hardest for me is the realization that just because I feel much better overall these days, I am NOT better. I’m going to feel pain and discomfort and lethargy and there is nothing I can do about it because as good as I might be feeling, the problem is still the problem and that didn’t change. What changed is that I know how to deal with the problem much better. The doctor who will be calling me back is also going to have some other information for me about next steps going forward, so hopefully I will learn something new today. And hopefully the pain will stop.

Let’s wish for a run tomorrow!

Click here for FitnessNYC’s Physique 57 DVD giveaway — but don’t click because I want to win this one.
Click here for Prior Fat Girl’s cookbook and apron giveaway.

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