cindy's world

I’ve been going strong at the gym, not because I’m motivated, but because I’m being dragged. I had Saturday off because the various activities Mr. W and I had planned, but we more than made up for it on Sunday’s 3-hour gym sesh in which I killed myself. Monday, I hit the gym at lunch as usual, then met up with Vanessa for that cardio weight-lifting class after work. Tuesday (yesterday), I skipped the gym at lunch to actually eat with some coworkers since I was too sore to do more weights, but after work Mr. W got me to a gym local to his house and he pounded out an hour of cardio on the elliptical trainer as I did 20 minutes on the bike, 22 minutes (2 miles) on the treadmill, 25 minutes on the elliptical trainer.

This morning, it seemed to pay off. While I was getting dressed, I noticed that my lower abdominal flab, which hangs like a smile under my belly button, was less smiley today. It was more like a tight-lipped smirk. So it’s going away! My reporter said something about how I must be losing weight, too. My pantsuit yesterday felt looser in the thigh, butt and lower abdomen area.

“It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” my gym trainee said yesterday when I told her that I was being dragged to an hour of cardio after work despite taking the noon workout off. “Yeah, apparently the gift also ricochets,” I said.

I can’t tell whether I’m bitching or bragging.

(In case anyone’s wondering about Mr. W’s progress, he had to tighten his belt one notch down this weekend.)

I heard this on the radio news but didn’t hear the location and the arrest date because I wasn’t paying attention until a few key words entered my ears. You’ll see…

A 33 year-old man was found naked, laying on a tree stump, masturbating just off a nature trail. He was arrested for indecent exposure. Shortly after he was confronted by the authorities, they also charged him with possession of a concealed weapon, because he had a 6-inch (or maybe longer, I wasn’t sure I heard it right) metal ice pick, covered in duct tape, inside his rectum.

It’d never occurred to me to get off on that. “I can do it in public…ooh! The danger of being caught…ooooh! And to be completely naked so that if I were seen, there’d be no getting away or an excuse that I was just taking an emergency pee break…ooooh! And I’ll put an ICE PICK up my ASS! ooOOOooOOOohhh!!!

My mom’s on a wacky roll today. This morning, an email string was going back and forth between my mom, Mr. W and me regarding an upcoming vacation he and I are planning. We’re going on an organized China tour in the near future and my mom’s got travel agent connections. Plus, she’s gone on 2 organized China tours herself so she has opinions on what places are worth visiting. The gist of the trip is that for about $1500, you get round-trip airfare, all transportation within China, all admissions into special parks or places on the program that require admission fees, all meals, all hotel accomodations (4-star hotels and higher), and tours for an 11-day trip. So my mom’s answering questions, giving us her feedback, telling us what her travel agent was quoting on tour packages and prices. And then all of a sudden out of nowhere, this paragraph from her:

11 days trip include Suzhou, wuzhen and Hangzhou, only 9 days trip exclude those places! I’d go for 11 days trip, only $60.00 more and you got 2 more days trip, meal and hotel! Any question, you can email her or call her tel# xxx-xxx-xxxx. She is very nice and she also can arrange Honeymoon trip!

Ehh??? That’s not subtle at all! And she doesn’t even know about a whole bunch of my friends who suddenly got engaged in the past few months. Mr. W thought it was so amusing he read the paragraph aloud to his coworkers.

And then later, my mom emailed me that my grandma’s birthday is this Friday, and that we should go out to dinner to celebrate. So this exchange followed:

Me: okay, we can both make it on Friday night. I suppose I should get Grandma something…what do you suppose she wants for her bday?
Mom: Money?
Me: really? that seems so impersonal.
Mom: Sign your name on it!

What the –? When did my mom get all wacky and smart-ass?

Vanessa invited me to attend a 24 Hour Fitness recreation class with her last nite, something called “24 SET.” I understand that SET is an acronym, but I don’t know what it stands for, except that it was a Seriously Excruciating Time. I didn’t realize how hard-core that class would be, so I maxed out all my major muscle groups plus biceps during a 3-hour workout the day before, on Sunday. Everything hurt during class except my ass, and I’m sure that’ll hurt later. The class, as it turned out, did some Seriously Excruciating sTuff on every muscle group, plus cardio. Hopping around the stepper while doing bicep curls (with weights), one-legged dumbbell squats and squats with the bar over our shoulders, pushups, crunches, lunges, hammer curls, tricep extensions, hip extensions, bench presses, deadlifts, we worked our shoulders, chest, back, hamstrings, quads, abs. The last time I sweat that much in just an hour of exercise was in a spinning class. Jeebus!

Vanessa asked at the end of class, as we dripped and oozed our way back to the locker room, whether I’m up for taking the class with her again next Monday. I said, “Okay.”

I’m in so much pain today that I’m skipping the gym. I’m going to lunch.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever written something based solely on request before, but I suppose there’s a first for everything. On the last post, the comments revealed that some readers had misunderstood the title to think that I was about to post some information that may be “too much information” for the general public. Thankfully, the post was rated PG. And yet, there was some disappointment about the family-friendly nature of the post, and even a request for a real TMI post. So here it is. If you don’t want to subject yourself to TMI, you don’t have to click on the “more” below.
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An earlier phone conversation between Mr. W and his 17-yr-old son…

W: Hey, what’re you doing?
Son: I’m playing “Guitar Hero” [at mom’s house].
W: Playing “Guitar Hero?” You’re not hanging out with your girlfriend?
(We just found out earlier today that son asked a girl to be his first girlfriend yesterday, and she said yes.)
Son: Yeah right, you think I can get my girlfriend to play “Guitar Hero”?!
W: Your girlfriend doesn’t play “Guitar Hero”?! What’s wrong with her? My girlfriend plays “Guitar Hero”.
Son: Yeah, I know…you have a tight girlfriend.

And that would be the first compliment Son’s ever paid me. 🙂 Blogworthy moment. Unless he was being sarcastic, which I hope he wasn’t.

On a double-date with two of Mr. W’s oldest friends, we saw the musical Camelot at a local stage production theatre, in La Mirada. This theatre is the first stop in Camelot’s national tour. I’ll have to say that this is much better than I expected, as the acting was amazing and funny. Laugh-out-loud moments were peppered throughout the show. Even tho the headliner Michael York (who plays King Arthur) was the only one with a 40 year career in screen, stage, and recording with bragging rights to the movies The Three Musketeers,” “Logan’s Run,” “The Island of Dr. Moreau, and all three Austin Powers movies, the two who really blew me away with their voices were Rachel York (Guenevere) and James Barbour (Lancelot). I mean, wow. What amazing singing. Mr. W was uncomfortable with Michael York playing the husband of Rachel York’s character, firstly because of the huge age difference, and secondly because we speculate that the two are real-life father and daughter. It was all a little Electra Complex for us. However, I think it works in the sense that King Arthur and Guenevere seemed to share a deep respect and love for each other, but when Lancelot stepped in, it was immediately apparent that the two, closer in age and attractiveness, had more of a lover-like, passionate chemistry.

If you’re local and interested in seeing Lerner and Loewe’s musical Camelot, it’ll be at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts from January 12th to the 28th.

Let’s see…what to say about the new belly dancing class?

Instructor – Fahtiem has a cutsie personality that comes across in her dancing. Her choreography is playful, like she doesn’t take her dancing too seriously. She was trying to get the class to smile while dancing, and since so many of us were concentrating and not smiling, she stood and turned in a circle in the center of the class making clown faces at all of us in turn to get us to laugh. Because of her personality, she’s likely a better belly dancer than my last instructor. My last instructor was much better on teaching technique, however. She was very clear on how each move is done, she tells you what the move is called, and you practice the moves individually. Fahtiem, on the other hand, you just have to follow and hope you’re doing what she’s doing.

Class – The usual variety of people you’d find in a mixed-level dance class. There’s the newbies who’re self-conscious and confused. And then you have the semi-newbies who think they’re better than they actually are and get all in your space doing exaggerated moves that don’t look as good as they seem to think. And then there are the old-timers who dance with their noses in the air, except when they’re facing a mirror in which case their eyes are glued to the dancing image of themselves and they are apparently enraptured and deeply in love with what they see. A very large girl who was supposed to be to my left in the dancing circle kept making what my coworker called “elephant steps” and overstepping her bounds into our space. My coworker, annoyed, finally told her to move over and stay within the circle instead of stepping in front of it.

Me – Man, do enough unfeminine stuff like jujitsu and weight-lifting and suddenly, all the grace is gone. I felt stiff, awkward, uncoordinated, and definitely not sensuous. I couldn’t bring out the playfulness of the routine because I was concentrating so hard on just remembering the steps first and not being rammed by the elephant trunk arm of the big girl to my left. Hopefully the artistic expression of the dance will come through soon, once I get the technical parts down.

My coworker remembered the class cost wrong and we each wrote a check for $54 for the remaining 7 sessions instead of the $50 advertised in the course guide. When we realized this, my coworker went back to the instructor and told her, and the instructor wouldn’t refund the difference, saying if we had paid through the City instead of to her directly, it would’ve cost us an extra $10 for not being City residents. But we’re not paying through the City, she wanted us to pay her directly so she gets all the money without the City taking a cut. Whatever. 6 weeks left. You know it’s bad when I’m doing a countdown of sessions left already in the first class. I did that all through yoga with the Crazy Yoga Instructor.

I noticed when I was driving the other day that my headlight settings seem to be different. I’d always thought it was on “auto,” meaning it turns on and off in response to an external light sensor. But now it was on this dot thing, I have no idea what the dot means, and the second half of the lever was turned on some strange picture. (Did the dealership change it last weekend?) After I got to the gym at lunch yesterday, I sat in the parking lot and looked through my car manual, then turned the dial back to “auto” for headlights, and turned off my foglamps. This made me 20 minutes late for the gym so my trainee and I only managed to get 4 different exercises in (3 sets of 15 each), plus 15 minutes of cardio.

Luckily, Vanessa emailed me in the afternoon inviting me to go to the gym with her in the evening after her acupuncture (*shudder*) appointment is over at 7p. She told me to pick a gym, and I picked Brea. I met her there, James also was there altho he worked out separately, and I’d called Vicky to go, too, but she didn’t show and didn’t call to let us know. *kick* It’s okay, we didn’t really expect to see her anyhow. We hit the weight floor probably about 8p and it wasn’t nearly as crowded as the other gyms we’ve been to! I guess New Year’s resolutions don’t hold as strongly in that area of Orange County. Aside from some chicks who have their hair done and are wearing full faces of makeup (why do they do that, btw? do they not plan on sweating, ever?), almost everyone there appeared to be gym regulars, going methodically machine to machine pumping iron to increase their already over-exercised proportions. The three of us stood around talking about what we’re going to do next; James hadn’t eaten dinner, Vanessa had a bowl of oatmeal before her acupuncture (*shudder*), and I had a couple bowls of soup. Vanessa opted to hit the cardio machine again, so James and I went to pick up some Lee’s Sandwiches, which we consumed in front of his giant TV while watching TiVo’ed episodes of South Park, grimacing as the hard-toasted bread cut into our gums and mouth-roofs upon every bite and the jalapenos seared every new injury.

Mr. W, from what I learned driving home from work yesterday, had planned to game the entire night with his brother and eat fast food. Basically, a bachelor’s evening. My bachelorette evening was hanging out with friends and working out, and eating relatively healthy. I’m pretty happy about that.

This evening: belly dancing with my coworker under her instructor for the first time. I’m kinda excited. She says her instructor gives a good workout and that I’m guaranteed to sweat, and that she’s always tired and sweaty after these sessions. My belly dancing instructor, I felt, was kind of tame in the exercise department. Now I get to see whether it’s just the instructor, or whether belly dancing just doesn’t do it as cardio for me.

I walked out to the parking structure with my gym trainee yesterday evening. She asked what I had planned. I said I may just watch TV on the couch until I fall asleep, which is a great luxury cuz I don’t have kids to pick up, cook for, or otherwise tend to. Driving home, I knew I had other options, too. I’d planned on going to jujitsu this week since the guilt has been driving me a bit batty. But it felt too cold to walk the 2 blocks from the parking area to the dojo. Childhood pal Vicky had called the other day, and I know she’s got more free time now, so we may plan something. Navy Girl Vanessa had invited me to a fitness class at 24 Hour Fitness that seemed interesting if I wanted to drive all the way out there. I also called James to see what time he was getting off work — not till late, he didn’t expect to be home till closer to 8p, but he left it up in the air after that (since he doesn’t sleep, anyway). Mr. W had also called on my drive home and said if I get bored, to go over to his house and play more video games with him and his bro.

So after I got home, I made some noodles for dinner and ate that while watching TV. Next thing I knew, it was 4am, “Cops” was on TV (no wonder I was dreaming about catching criminals), and 2 out of my 4 previously lit candles had burned themselves out. I blew out the remaining candles and went upstairs to bed.

Earlier at work, I received an email from Vanessa who asked if I ended up going to jujitsu, and confessed that she’d missed the workout class at the gym. She said she put some fish in the oven, sat down to wait for it and the next thing she knew, it was 7pm, she’d missed class, and the fish was burnt.

Mr. W called earlier to see what I did last nite. I had to confess that I didn’t do much of anything. He laughed at me. I said that Vanessa had done the same thing, except she burnt fish instead of candles. He said it’s lucky we didn’t burn our houses down. I said that’s why we used to live well together; I was awake in the early evening so she wouldn’t have forgotten the fish, and she used to blow out my candles in the wee hours when I fell asleep watching TV. My college roommie used to take the textbook out of my hands and turn off the reading lamp when I fell asleep. Haha. Some things never change.