Stumbling Through Adulthood

Perry totaled the Prius, sigh. He's fine, so is the other driver. Same way as the other Prius, when the person in front of the person in front of him slammed on their brakes and as #3 he wasn't able to stop in time. The driver who caused this by braking had their car tapped by driver #2, but drove off without stopping or checking on their car, WTF is with that? The thing is... everyone who drives with him is impressed at how good a driver he actually is, he just seems to get caught in those wrong place wrong time situations (the third time he was rear-ended, he got stopped in time, so did the two cars behind him, but a 4th car -with no insurance, of course- came up and slammed into everyone, though Perry did not hit the person in front of him). Anyhow. Sigh. So yeah. He has to buy a new car, and hopefully his insurance won't drop him, though he's never had a claim with them. And we have to buy a car too. This just sucks. Dh keeps on insisting it's not worth it to repair the Pilot, and he might be correct, but he's doing zip to get anything in its place. This time of year, it's all work, trains, and the occasional surfacing for a rowing event. But ugh.

I'm off today, starting my new schedule. Boss wants me working M-T-W, which yeah, gives me 4 day weekends every weekend, but damn, Mondays are going to be difficult, getting back into the swing of things after that long of a break.

I had an interview this morning. Eh? Dunno.

Our pregnant mama rat had her pups, Elena sacrificed all but one but did the part I refuse to which is taking them away from her. Despite our desires, the three of us (E, the postdoc, and I) did not take mama out to cuddle her. I did, however, do the PI-to-PI transfer that means E or I did not have to euthanize her. I don't know what happens to her next, I hope for a better outcome. I was kinda horrified that they let me transfer her, without an official ok from the PI, though of course I had his verbal agreement. I suspect that in an effort to get the animal management off his plate, he gave me the keys to the (rodent) kingdom.

I had a weight check with my NP yesterday. BMI officially under 25, even accounting for the fact that I'm shorter than I used to be. 🤬 My 1.60 m is now just only 1.58 m, so no longer a short 5ft3 but an even shorter 5ft2 and a tiny bit of change. I remember measuring in at 1m60, because it was the height a few doctors used to bully me, since my 60 kg at the time -132 lbs- was OMG, disgusting and gross, I should not weight more than 50 kg (110 lbs), ie the number of cm after the 1 meter minus 10 that they used. I bulemia'ed my way to 55 kg (hey, it was the 80s, I was in good company) but could not get any lower. Ah well.

Other outcome of the visit: got persuaded to get two vaccines: pneumonia, since I guess at some point the rec went from age 65 to age 50, and shingles. They warned me the shingles vaccine was a bit rough. Yeah. It is. I got one in each arm -that was stupid, what was I thinking?- and now my arms are hella sore, I have chills and nausea. My body has not been doing well with vaccines these past few years, since the second mRNA shot. Ah well, done. And I must remind dh to get his, as well as an MMR booster.

Tomorrow is Opening Day for the boating season! Linnea will be racing in the 2V8, since there is no category for her V4 boat. Perry will be in an 8 with a bunch of WWU and Seattle U alumni, should be fun. I think they need to rename their team to the Flying Fossils and apply decals of a skeletal T Rex rampant. I'm thinking that dh and I should drop Perry off at the boathouse, leave our car there, then bike to the course. Once we decide we're committed to one side of the Montlake Cut or the other. I might leave our bikes in the lab. Yeah, it's frowned upon, but maybe nobody would notice on a Saturday?

Well, March is over and I was up about 3 pounds for the month, grr.

It's been a bit of a rough month, starting with my aunt's death, followed by celebrating a few birthdays and other good things, and then the job thing, all on a background of the stress engendered by that lying dog shit in the White House and his cadre of craven crooks. So yeah. Some stress eating, some celebration eating, some sadness eating. Zeppy helps limit but unlike for some people, it doesn't make me ill if I eat a bit much.

So. Up.

I am upping my dose to the max and so the end of weight loss is near, at least until they come out with some better meds, LOL.

That said...

We went on a hike yesterday, just a short ramble to Twin Falls. We did the same hike two years and a month ago, at the start of my weight loss. And took a selfie at the same spot. Note that one camera is the selfie camera, the other is the 0.5 lens, so there is some distortion on that, but yeah, even I can truly see how much weight I've lost.





The hike was much easier. I didn't need hiking poles. Nobody encouraged me or really paid any attention to me. The paradox of being fat: in most of society, you are invisible, aside from disgusted or contemptuous looks, but in exercise or outdoors situations, you are highly visible, your existence in their space open to comment and appraisal.

We went a bit further up on the trail to see if we could reach the Cascades to Palouse trail that we used a few times while training for our half marathon, but the trail past the falls that heads to it was, tbh, boring so we bailed after a bit. Walked down to the lower fall this time, something we didn't attempt last time, both because of me but also dh. He's in much better shape now too.

A few other photos from the hike.

❄ Perry's coach took this a few weeks ago and posted it again today. I managed to grab it.

https://1drv.ms/v/s!Ap5tbOHbgHtsi6l9H4bVZL2xt6OCFw?e=O0Tt8P

It was a gorgeous day and I think my boyo looks pretty damn good too!

❄ Busy weekend. Didn't get half of what I wanted to get done done, but I did get a few things accomplished. Linnea is home, yay! Planning for Christmas is a mess; I really need to buckle down to it. If I can at least get a plan down in my head, I feel better, more in control, and much less stressed. But of course, the thought of thinking about it all stresses me out. Circular badness.

❄ I had a bad eating weekend. There were just too many things to eat sitting around and ate them I did. The problem is that I ate while not being hungry and -and this is the bad part- I'm not not feeling well as a result. Ah well. I'll get back on track tomorrow, I'm not horrified or feeling out of control, just... like I ate too much junk.

I need to start writing again. Desperately.

But my thoughts are all over the place in a chaotic panicky mess.

If anyone is interested in a better social media platform, bluesky is totally a better place than twitter, LOL. I've had an account for a while, read but did not post there since then, but started transitioning there sometime last month, when twitter got too toxic.

Work is shitty. New postdoc and I'm the one who is supposedly training him. This sucks and again, not what I want to do in a job. Add in that my PI has all of a sudden decided that there must be something wrong with my cell culture technique and is observing and critiquing me as I work with cells. Comments like "you have some theoretical knowledge of cell culture, but not much practice". Dude, I may not have been doing it for twenty years, but a) you haven't done anything in over 5, by your own admission and b) I've been passaging, freezing, thawing, and otherwise dealing with cells for 6 months now, with no contamination and plenty of live healthy cells to show for it. The one experiment that is not working is something else. Not sure what, but I'm 99% sure, as was the previous postdoc -we worked out the protocol and the parameters together and did the experiments in tandem- that is has zip to do with the cells or my sterile technique. I was very close to walking out yesterday. Plus, my dude. You have bigger hands than me. There are manipulations I cannot do without putting down a cap. "Practice," he says, but practice not going to make my hands bigger. Other annoying thing. He gave me a bit of an independent piece of research to do, YAY. He keeps on asking me where I'm at with it. That's nice. The holdup? Purchasing. I'm waiting on the stuff I need to start the experiment, and it took purchasing three days to get a PO to the company. They're fast when it's a simple please order me this product, but when it's paying for a service, it always takes longer and there we are.

I've been avoiding the internet and doing more reading. I like that.

Weight loss is going fine. I'm up a bit these past few days, which is frustrating, but overall, I'm thrilled. While BMI isn't something I trust as, well, indicative of anything, I'm at this point within spitting distance of "normalweight", a status I never thought I'd even approach. We'll see if I get there. These meds are a fucking miracle. Dh's work plan is high deductible, so I'll be paying a lot for them next year until we meet that deductible, but I can afford it and it's totally fucking worth it. Life changing. Not perception changing, though. I still see myself as a fat person but I'm starting to think that other people no longer do. Body dysmorphia is real.

Planning the holidays. Tonight, I'll start the first Tday shopping, and this weekend I'll start to prep the base for the gallon for so of gravy that I make every year... ok, maybe not a gallon, but a lot. I usually end up with plenty for the turkey, and I freeze the rest to use in chicken stews etc over the rest of the year. I'll also get apples to pre-cook for a pie, I'm going to try to make an apple pie this year. I'm terrible with pies. It looks like Christmas is going to be here. My sister will come up and probably bring my mom. We'll celebrate on Christmas Eve and then on Christmas day, get up early, pack brunch, and go to Vancouver to spend the day with my aunt. It'll be her last Christmas. Not thinking about that right now but focusing on the logistics of "a lot to do, lots of food to prep for two holidays, while working, and a house to get in order for guests".

We went to Bend last weekend for four days; I took Friday off. My aunt flew down with a friend of hers, and we had a good time. She's slipping quickly, but still there. My mom is doing SO much better in memory care. I mean, the issues are the same but she's happier, and even not seeing her daily, the slippage in cognitive function in the time between visits isn't at all jarring, in contrast to my aunt, whose is. Sigh. Anyhow. Dementia fucking sucks beyond words.

Funny idea. Dh has done a "twice smoked ham" in the smoker a few times, and his briskets are now legendary in the family, LOL. I am planning fancy roast beef (Perry and I are mulling beef Wellington) for Christmas Eve. I'll need a separate port gravy, so I suggested dh smoke a brisket so I can use the non-smoked tbc trimmings for gravy/demi-glace. Then I came on the brilliant idea of packing and freezing ham and brisket for Anne-Chloe and Linnea as part of their holiday haul. LOL. I think they -especially Linnea- will be thrilled.

I like that alliteration.

1. Mice. Call me the Grim Reaper. I've going to have to euthanize 12 -at least, possibly as many as 15- cages of mice (three singletons, 12 pairs). All of them -except one cage- are past their breeding age, and we need pups. 😭 And let me tell you. In the era of JD Vance making it clear that post-menopausal women have no societal use beyond taking care of grandkids, euthanizing a bunch of too-old-to-breed mice is kinda adding to the horror of this. I need to find a new job. One without mice or anything else than bacteria, plants, or nematodes. I need to keep this one for a while longer so. The upside is that I have a small bit of research project to do. But mice.

2. The glory and the no-so-glory, LOL. Start with the latter. I bought a pair of leggings from amazon. Size XL, which should have been on the edge of big according to numbers. Too small. I returned and ordered... a pair of XXL, which just fit, they'll work, though after wearing them for an hour, they're weird and I wish I hadn't taken off the tags. I've been consistently wearing Ls in bottoms for a while now, so the XXL both vexed me and made me laugh at myself. In other weight loss news... My weight in kg finally starts with a 6. This is a major major fucking milestone for me, and a number I never ever EVER thought I'd see again. These medications are fucking miraculous.

3. Christmas is turning into a CF. My aunt -who will be availing herself of MAID in March, so this is her last Christmas- was going to come but then decided no, she'd come down to Bend so she can see my mom over November 11th. My brother, who wants to see my aunt and my mom, decided that he didn't want to fly over the holidays either and is planning on coming down early December. Christmas falls on a Wed which means to go to Bend, I'd need to take at least 2 days, and with only having 10 days a year of vacay, using two on a pre-planned trip last April etc, I'm pretty tight on vacation if I want to be able to take off more than a few days next summer. All this is complicated by the fact that my sister has said that if we don't come down for Christmas, she's leaving my mom and taking off for a beach somewhere with her spouse. I just don't know what to do. I drew my line which is my mom spending Christmas alone, so I might just have to have her up here while my sister travels, which is of course complicated by getting her here etc. Ideally everyone would such it up and actually spend the holidays here with me. We could do a Christmas Eve dinner, have brunch and drive up to Canada to spend a few hours with my aunt. But nobody is budging. I don't know what to do. My siblings are usually more flexible than this. Also, corollary about the vacation to the beach blackmail thing. I spent the last year I had free taking care of my mom. I took no vacations for a year (my sister took three or four that year). I had wanted my mom to go to memory care right away because this was clearly not a good solution, but sister insisted that she could come live with her as soon as the remodel was done. Fast forward the remodel is done, my mom is in memory care, which was now and would have been then, the right decision for her, she's doing great. Sister is still taking vacations to far off places and I'm stuck, again having spent the year I had planned on spending doing a lot of travel unable to go anywhere. So grr. Usually I'm on the same page as my siblings but two are retired and two have a lot more vacay than I do.

1. I'm devastated at what the media and some leading Dems did to Joe Biden. And disgusted. Some of them were people that I respected. Others were people I sent money to. I will be more than happy to send money to their primary opponents next time they run. I do love that those disgusting people wanted an open primary at the Convention, and Joe Biden, in a Dark Brandon move, denied them that by endorsing her. It was brilliant.

2. I love Kamala Harris. I supported her in 2020 and was looking forward to supporting her in 2028. I've spent this past week, however, in an up-then-down sort of way. There is a lot of excitement about her candidacy, and it's infectious. But then... I honestly don't think she can win. I think that, like Clinton, she'll blow out the popular vote easy but fail in the Electoral College. I hate this. I think in 2028, after four more years of capable and stable leadership and Trump -either dead or completely mush-for-brains- out of the picture, she could win. This year? I don't think so. They're motivated by hate and they have a systemic electoral college advantage. I think we'll also lose the Senate. By not doing any partisan gerrymandering, NY may have cost us the ability to retake the House and after the Supreme Court's decision about racial gerrymandering the few districts we could have grabbed either in 24 or 26 are in jeopardy. So I'm no longer hopeful about our chances this year, and some of the polls are already scaring me (there is evidence that a) Biden significantly outpolls Harris in some swing states, b) that the most reliable voting block doesn't like her -their mistake, imo-, and c) the never-Trump vote might not follow Harris.) I'll donate and maybe even volunteer and be positive etc when out in public but this -with my two or three readers, and three maybe be an overestimate, 🤣- I'm being honest about my feelings. Ugh.

3. Work is sucking these days. I'm bored.

4. Continuing to plug away at the weight loss thing with Zeppy. That drug is a fucking miracle. I've been eating the same way for over a year now and last fall, I'd pretty much stopped losing more than a few ounces here or there. Zepbound restarted that, I suspect with some biochemical tinkering of my set point, leaving my body no longer defending a very high weight. I've lost more than I ever thought I would or could and I'm less than 10lbs from a dream goal, which might or might not happen: being able to ride Icelandic horses here, right down the road from me! If I get there, I'll be thrilled, but even if I don't, it'll be fine, I'll just have to ride them in Iceland where the weight limit they allow is higher, LOL. I feel so much more relaxed about the day-to-day ins and outs of dieting and eating and exercising. I've always hated and mistrusted the addiction framing on people being fat, for various reasons (*), and at first, I was a bit surprised at the data that show that GLP-1 drugs are effective at helping with addiction. They seem to, which is great and I've seen some commentary about how yeah, fatties are just addicts but... GLP-1 are also being shown to be effective in Parkinson's disease and in a phase 3 trial, Alzheimer's. I don't think we're "there" yet on figuring out exactly how they work and how they help people, though they clearly do. (*) Hard to be addicted to something that you need to actually survive. In addition, the arguments seem very much which came first the chicken or the egg to me. Anyhow, as more research into GLP-1 drugs come out, I hope the addiction model gets ditched wholesale, and hopefully we'll get some insight into the brain biochemistry that is very clearly involved. It always was, as many of us fatties have long suspected, just a little bit more complicated that Calories In Calories Out, which, while try, is elides the whole "how the calories are processed".

5. In light of that, I'll share this review: Trapped fat: Obesity pathogenesis as an intrinsic disorder in metabolic fuel partitioning. Normally I'd steer clear of anything with Gary Taubes's name on it (his agenda has led him down some pretty tortuous paths) but this is nevertheless interesting, though I haven't done enough of a deep dive or search on primary sources to trust it all. Still worth a read, if only to be familiar with this reframing.

6. This is in pink! My baby girl turned 21 this week! OMG, how the eff did that happen, she was just a baby two minutes ago! She's an extraordinary young person!

7. We have a few days of camping booked for late September at Crater Lake. The boat tours will have shut down by then. 😢 Why do they stop those a full 10 days before they close the campground? Still, looking forward to that. And we booked two nights (and a previous one so we can get an early start) at a campground near Mt Baker for early September. Had to book Sunday and Monday night, which was the best I could do for minimizing vacation days. We'll get up early Tuesday morning and hopefully I can get into work in time for a solid half day. Tomorrow, we have to drive Linnea to Bellingham so she can start packing hrr place up, since her old and new places don't overlap, sigh, but we'll be taking her furniture down. Anyhow, plan is to leave her the trailer and head out to go on three short hikes in the area.

8. Perry is leaving for a regatta in Canada tomorrow at 5am. I should get some sleep, we have to drive him to the airport. He'll be pretty close to Niagara Falls, and he's hoping to get a group of athletes together to go visit. I hope he does, and I really want to go back there one of these years, I loved going when I was a kid.

9. Still looking for a plan to get my novel moving towards publication. I know I need an agent, but each time I look at agents/agencies, I realize my poor little book doesn't quite fit into any category. Yes, romance, but it's too long to fit their size requirements. One of these days, I'll figure out my next steps. Maybe I should find someone to put it in audiobook format, since that seems to be a good way to get traction. Anyhow.

Three things? I think there are more I need to talk about!

1. Starting with the most exciting: Linnea got into the Computer Science major!!!!!. Tbh, quite unexpected, but being a girl with learning disabilities probably helped. So yay for that, I'm so excited for her. One of the differences between her and Perry's long quest to get into the Biochem major? She has an excellent department advisor (as opposed to one who not only did not help but indeed... fibbed a bit on a few things) who helped her pick classes and supported her a lot. But yay! So relieved for her. Her boyfriend did not get in (despite good grades etc) so is looking at trying to get in for a Masters.

2. Last month on Zeppy, maintaining the lowest dose, I did not lose anything, I've been playing with the same two pounds since end of May. I'll go up in dosage this week and see if it makes a diff. But. Nothing fits. Things that fit less than a month ago are all of a sudden baggy to the point that I cannot wear them. Which yay, but I did not need to find out that two pair of leggings and three pair of jeans no longer fit on... Monday morning. I currently have one pair that fits (thanks Value Village), one pair that I can wear for two days, it has spandex or whatever in it, something I usually hate but nobody does 100% cotton in black that I have found, and I hope my yoga pants will still fit but I didn't try them on this morning, so who knows? Again, I'm not unhappy about this, it's part of the package of losing weight but not today? I tried on one of the pairs of jeans last week and I swear it fit.

3. We have park entry tickets to Rainier on Wednesday. We found a campsite for Tuesday night. Yay? Only the weather forecast has gone to sh*t and I'm not sure I really want to go. Plan was to camp, get up to catch first light at Reflection Lakes, and then do a hike up into a cirque with incredible views of the mountain on the way down. Oh, and some night photography the evening before if we weren't too tired. None of which will happen if the weather is crummy, so I don't know what to do.

4. I did book camping for late September in Crater Lake. It's not managed by Recreation.gov so the bots don't seem to book every single effing campsite as soon as they're available.

5. We went on a bike ride yesterday. First in more than a few years. It was great! Dh found out he needs new shoes, and we couldn't find his helmet, so he ordered new ones (he borrowed Perry's for yesterday). We kept it to 10 miles because of lessons learned in years past, we started out the season one year with a 40-mile ride. None of us, and that included Anne-Chloe and Perry, were happy the next day! It was good and we're planning on more rides this summer.

1. It's going to be an exhausting week, to say the least. Concert tomorrow (Anne-Chloe and Chris bought us tix. I don't particularly like the band, but AC and dh do, so it'll work), dh has trains stuff until stupid late Wednesday, we have to get a car into the shop, we have to prep to go to Bend for the weekend, and we're spending nights in a campground on the way down and up so have to prep for that. Work isn't going to be any better.

2. I run out of Zeppy this week, which means I have 10 days to get another box. I am already starting to freak out.

3. Perry's graduation is in less than a month and I have nothing to wear. None of my nice clothes fit. Yeah, yay, it's because they are too big, but... I don't have anything to wear. And I despise clothes shopping. I despise online clothes shopping even more. And the thing I despise most is sleeveless tops/dresses. 🤣

Putting all of this under a cut because of discussion of weight loss.

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It feels odd. Good, but odd.

I am so fucking hungry it hurts. This is unlike anything I've experienced before outside of the profound hunger of very early pregnancy (which of course was compounded by nausea.), and I just want to curl up and cry.

Diet hasn't changed, I'm eating the same things. I suspect it's my body taking revenge.

I have an Rx in for the starter dose again. I'm 6th on the waiting list. They hope to get "some" in next week.

I'm very uncomfortable with the compound route, but it may end there if Lilly doesn't get their freaking act together and get stuff out soon.