ChiKat

On the MS 150, at each rest stop, they have drinks and snacks. Usually it's fruit, cookies and energy bars. I'm not a huge fan of the energy bars. They pack a huge amount of protein (usually 40+ grams). Being vegan, I'm happy when I get 15 grams of protein a day. I’m convinced the energy bars could kill me.

But when you're biking that much, you really need to replenish the body's resources, and water isn't enough. I spent the first half of the day drinking PowerAde, only to realize that the first ingredient was high fructose corn syrup, which I firmly believe is straight from one of Dante's layers of hell. That stuff is nasty. I was HORRIFIED to realize that I was consuming so much of it.

Since PowerAde is really just giving you water with the addition of sugar and salt to help your body utilize the water, I decided to skip the nasty corn syrup and consume either fruit or regular table sugar (for an explanation of the difference between corn syrup and table sugar, click here).

Since I've been avoiding sugar in all forms except fruit for the past few months, I stuck with fruit for about 10 miles. But there’s only so much watermelon that even I can consume, so after awhile I started eating some of the cookies.

Oh. My. God.

They are just as wonderful as I remember.

What I needed to do was eat a single cookie at each rest stop. Instead, I would eat three or four. They were HEAVEN. I biked faster just to get to the next set of cookies! And it didn't matter, right? Because I was just going to burn them off anyway!

Right. I’m probably the only person who biked 150 miles and GAINED WEIGHT.

We live on the top floor of a three-story building. The unit below us is empty. The unit on the first floor is being rented to a woman who has a constant stream of relatives staying with her. I’m never sure who actually lives in the unit and who is just visiting for the day/week/month.

I was walking past her back door the other day, when I heard a whistle. I saw three boys hanging out by her unit, ranging from five to fifteen. I waved and said hello in my cheerful, "It’s a small building and we are ALL GOING TO GET ALONG, OK?" kind of manner. The oldest boy said hi and then offered to wash my car. I said, "No thanks. We don’t mind it dirty."

As soon as I said it, a tiny little voice groaned in my head because that sounded racier than I meant. The kid’s eyes totally lit up and he said, "You like it dirty, huh?" and moved toward me, almost strutting. Then he said, "Who's 'we'?" I laughed and said, "My husband and I" and the kid looked shocked that I would be married. He totally sputtered and backed off, saying, "Oh! Sorry! Sorry!" and I laughed and drove off.

Afterwards I felt a bit gross. I realized that the whistle was most likely from the teenager and that he was flirting with me. He was half my age. How is it that some men (and probably some women) could get so turned on by someone that young? Ugh.

I need to do some gardening today. I’m desperately hoping that only the usual bunch of recovering (I hope) crank-addicts will hit on me and not the teenager.

We’ve lived in our condo for more than a year now. It’s not the safest neighborhood in Chicago, and it took me awhile to feel safe. When we first moved in, every thud sounded like someone breaking in. Every bang sounded like a gunshot.

Now, I’m much more adept at identifying actual gun shots as opposed to the following noises that sound remarkably like gun shots:
- A car back-firing
- Fireworks
- A car driving over a steel plank by the construction site
- Construction debris being tossed into a dumpster

In the summer, there is usually a month long spat of violence during gang initiations. Usually, a victim is pushed to the ground and punched and kicked for a few minutes by a group of kids, and then the kids scatter. The victim is rarely beaten enough to need medical attention, but it certainly doesn’t sound like fun.

There is also a problem with muggings in the area, often armed muggings. I try to stay extra alert when I am walking, and I don’t take my purse unless I really need it. Frankly, because we are so close to a private university, the students make a much more desirable target. They walk around with their laptop bags, cell phones and iPods, practically screaming, "I’m a target!"

A man was fatally shot in our alley, not 20 feet from our building (we weren’t home at the time, but came home to the police tape). We’ve seen a woman mugged (a neighbor was able to chase down the mugger and get her purse back).

I’m getting more used to the violence, and I truly appreciate the community members who rage against the gangs, the drug problems and the poverty that are at the root of the problems. Programs like Cease Fire are full of dedicated community members trying to change the South Side of Chicago for the better.

And yet we still have senseless violence, the type of violence that takes the life of Antoinette Means, a 19-year-old girl who was working behind the counter at KFC when an armed robber killed her. She didn’t try to stop the man from robbing the store. She let him take the $50. He didn’t have to kill her, but he chose to fire a shot when he was running out of the restaurant. She was killed for $50. Every life is worth more than that.

One of my biggest concerns about starting my own blog was the fact that I would be writing a personal journal, but I would be making that journal public.

Almost every blogger I know has a story about someone they love finding their blog and being hurt by the contents. I have my own experience finding a blog written by someone I know, only to be hurt reading about how awful she thought I was. What was most upsetting to me was the fact that she never indicated in real time that she was upset by my behavior.

Do you know why she never said anything? Because the things we vent about in our private journals don’t always need to be spoken in real time. Sometimes we are irritated with people and we rant about them, and then we get over it. I’ve ranted about this girl to my husband before. But the spoken word disappears. The typed word stays in the archives.

When I finally decided to start my own blog, I did so with two rules in place:

#1: Don’t embarrass my mother.
Frankly, it's ridiculous to even think that my mom would read my blog. I don't think she knows what a blog is. But I'm a firm believer in worst case scenarios, and my worst case scenario is my mom reading about my sex life. Therefore, I don’t write about anything that I wouldn't be able to say at the family dinner table.

#2: Don’t get my husband fired.
You're never going to read what I think of his boss, his place of employment or his colleagues. I decided to go public with my journal. My husband didn't. I respect his right to remain anonymous and gainfully employed.

With those two rules in place, I have to admit things are kind of boring around here. It's a pretty tame blog. I have no dramatic issues or shocking truths to wrestle with. But at the end of the day, I'm so delighted to have this blog. It’s forced me to sit down everyday and ask myself, "What’s on my mind today?"

Rather than let them stew inside, unexplored, I’m actually articulating some of my thoughts and concerns. It’s so shockingly healthy. Who knew blogging was just like yoga?

I survived the MS 150! Actually, last year I survived. This year I did fantastic. The first day was comfortable, but a little hot and humid. I averaged around 13 mph compared to last year’s 9 mph. So I was really pleased. The second day, it was cooler and magically I was averaging 15.5 mph on most of the segments.

At this time last year I couldn’t walk due to the horrible joint pain in my knees. This year, I’m a little sore, but overall I feel great! I’m so pleased. I attribute it all to my diet changes. I have an RA doctor’s appointment this Wednesday. I can’t wait to hear what my doctor has to say about things. He told me that he saw some people improve a little bit with diet changes, but only if they had mild RA. I have severe RA, so he didn’t believe diet changes would have any impact on me.

I decided to try them anyway, because what could it hurt? I’m so glad I did. I can’t tell you how demoralizing it was last year to be so crippled by the bike-a-thon. This year, I felt like superman.

Edited to add: Forgot to mention the bike-a-thon raised more than $1.75 million for MS research!

My husband and I were eating out at a tiny restaurant one night. Each table had a low candle and a basket of bread. I flipped open the napkin that was covering the fresh-from-the-oven bread (SOB! I miss white flour!). Unbeknownst to me, the napkin landed in the candle and started a fire. But just a tiny fire. We didn’t notice it right away, but then a little bit of smoke started floating between us and we realized my error. We flipped the napkin out of the candle. The tiny, tiny fire was immediately extinguished. There were only two other couples in the restaurant, and both were in low conversations. The one waiter was in the kitchen. No one seemed to notice our pyrotectonics so we figured we wouldn’t say anything (what was there to say?) and get on with our meal.

Suddenly, the waiter came rushing out of the kitchen SCREAMING, "THERE IS A FIRE! SOMETHING IS BURNING! WHAT IS BURNING?"

The other two couples leapt up to leave, then looked around a bit confused…because there was clearly no fire. At first, my husband and I were too shocked to say anything – the waiter was truly screaming and hysterical (some kind of childhood fire trauma, I assume). In any crises situation (or, as the case may be, in any mildly surprising situation), I am totally useless. I will say nothing. I won’t move. I won’t blink. I am the deer right before it becomes road kill.

Thankfully, my husband is a bit more capable of handling life, so he stuttered out the fact that we had MISTAKENLY caused a TINY fire, but everything was ok. I thought the waiter would get a chuckle out of it, but instead, it was clear that he didn’t believe it had been an accident. He came to our table and stood above us, arms folded, and examined our evidence. Then gave us a look that clearly said WE HAD TRIED TO BURN HIS RESTAURANT DOWN. He very purposefully swiped the candle off our table and slammed it onto another table before stomping back into the kitchen.

My husband looked over at me and said, "Now’s probably a bad time to ask for more bread, right?"

I spent my time in Seattle at a dot.com company. I wasn’t the most amazing employee ever, but I did experience a modest amount of success. I felt satisfied with my job, although I never really loved it.

The biggest perk of the dot.com experience was a stock option package that means my husband and I don’t have to worry about saving for retirement as much as most people our age. Because we can live off my husband's salary, it also means that I don't have to work full-time.

Sure, if I worked full-time, we could probably live in a much nicer neighborhood. Maybe we could even afford a single-family home rather than a condo. But I’m just not interested in working full-time.

I’m college-educated. I have a good resume. I can get a job. I just don’t want one. Right now, I work part-time (from home) writing for a marketing company. I don’t have any kind of desire to change "part-time" into "full-time".

A lot of people I know are pretty unimpressed with my career path. They just don’t understand why I’m not getting a "real job". They are clearly trying to figure out what I do all day if I’m not at work. It’s obvious to them that I’m lazing about, napping in the afternoon or playing with the dog.

The truth of it is, there are some days when that is EXACTLY what I am doing. But for the most part, I’m pretty busy. If I’m only working part-time, I believe that means I should pick-up 90% of the household tasks. So when I’m not writing, I clean, I grocery shop, I do laundry.

So 1950’s, I know. But is that so bad? Apparently, to some people, it is. I think men have always been pressured to be bread-winners, but now women get almost as much pressure to have careers because otherwise women are (choose all that apply):

• wasting our education
  
• not valuing the rights that so many women fought so hard for
  
• setting the feminist movement back 20 years
  
• being lazy
  

I probably would have felt the same way in college. But I've learned that I'm much happier working part-time. I'm willing (and thankfully, so is my husband) to go without a huge salary in order to work part-time. I'm just surprised at how perplexed people are by that decision.

Forgot to mention that I have one more day and then I'm doing the bike-a-thon for 150 miles.

Amount of times I trained this year: 3
Increase from the amount of training I did last year: 3X
Amount of fear that the 150 miles will KILL ME: 300%
Guilt I feel about dragging my husband along: 0.05%

In addition to not having a lot of career options here, my husband misses the mountains. He really wants to live somewhere where he can hike or ski on the weekends. I like spending my weekends in the city, or hanging out with family. The perfect solution would be to move my entire family to somewhere like Boulder or Seattle, but that isn’t going to happen.

People always tell me that marriage is about compromise. I think that’s crap. It’s never about compromise. It’s about losing. You want one thing, you husband wants something else. One of you is going to lose. And because you’re married, because you are in this partnership, you have to be happy with losing.

I understand now that while we were in Seattle, I wasn’t able to be happy about losing. I certainly wasn’t curled up in a ball, unable to move, buried under my depression. But I gained some weight, I didn’t care as much about my appearance, I didn’t try to make friends. I got angry easily. The dishes not being done really bothered me.

I think that’s how women communicate sometimes. I had to accept that we were 3,000 miles from everyone I loved, but accepting that wasn’t easy. So I yelled about the household chores and stopped trying to be pretty.

I don’t want to go back to that. I’m determined that this time, if we move, I won’t lose myself like that. But at the same time, I so desperately don’t want to move. I want to magically make my husband happy here.

Took the dog to the lake yesterday. Within minutes, he was blissfully happy and dripping in algae. That lake is so gross. I had heard that the beaches were going to start flying red/yellow/green flags to indicated water quality, but I have yet to see a flag. It’s a great idea. I’d love to have a better idea about the water quality on any given day.

The dog drank a ton of the water and he’s not vomiting today, so I’m assuming the water quality was pretty decent yesterday.

People love to watch the dog swim in the lake. We throw sticks to him and he fetches them. By the third or fourth throw, we usually have a small audience cheering him on. Yesterday, on one of the dog’s last runs, he swam past the stick without realizing it. And kept swimming. And swimming. I have to admit, my heart stopped for a little bit. The dog is not smart. He probably would have swum until he sunk. It was a little frightening. We started to yell his name, but he was pretty far out in the water and must not have heard us. Luckily, one of our audience members had a really deep voice, and he yelled out to the dog. That caught his attention, and the dog turned to look back at us. He saw us jumping up and down and clapping, so he turned around and started to swim back. Then he saw the stick that he had passed, and I could actually see his ears perk up as he got excited at the successful fetch. His audience cheered for him when he made it to shore and he rewarded them by shaking off all the algae water onto them. What a charmer.

When we’re down at the lake, we see more and more dads out with their kids, with no mom in sight. It’s really nice. It seems like it is more and more acceptable for a father to spend time alone with his children.