The Kings of Huntsville

I’ve been trying to work more activity into my life. It’s difficult. I prefer going to the gym, but carving out time to drive down there, work out, then drive back is near to impossible between work (for me), gymnastics (both girls), soccer (at least two of us, if not all 4), and church (all of us). I have one day a week open where we have no after school activities. So far that one day a week has been spent trying to catch a nap to make it through the week, or running errands that didn’t get done earlier in the week. All that to say, getting to the gym is just not easy right now. Monday night I decided to sneak in a walk in the neighborhood after the girls went to bed. I got outside, and not 3 minutes into my walk, something flew into my eye! After a few seconds of fierce blinking, it didn’t hurt to keep my eye open, so I carried on walking. When I got home, I looked and looked in the mirror and didn’t see anything. A mystery! My eye still stung a bit, but I didn’t give it much more thought. I just figured it was irritated from whatever had flew into it, and hoped that whatever it was, was gone for good. I took my contacts out for good measure, and moved onto the nightly tv watching before bed.

Tuesday morning I get up, and when I look in the mirror – there’s a little spec on lower eyelid! Apparently, the bug made it’s way out. I called the eye doctor to make sure there wasn’t anything else hanging out in there and to make sure I didn’t need antibiotics, or something. My eye checked out ok, outside of some irritation remaining and I was sent on my way with orders to get eye drops and use for the next couple of days.

Later Tuesday, I had to take our cat, Jasmine, to the vet. At her last appointment, the vet was concerned with her eye. We knew her eye looked funny when you looked at it – it kind of reflects light back at you. At her previous appointment, the vet we saw that time didn’t seem too concerned. This year, though, the newer vet was much more concerned. Turns out her lens is no longer attached, and was turned around. The way her lens was situated is causing fluid build up in her eye, which is causing high eye pressure. Yesterday’s appointment was to check that pressure again. You can see here that one eye looks different from the other.

It wasn’t lost on me that we both had our eye pressure checked yesterday. While my check was for something minor, and turned out just fine, hers is a bigger deal. The vet determined yesterday that her pressure is still very high with no improvement in the past four months. She can’t see out of that eye currently, and the pressure is bound to be causing lots of pain, even though she doesn’t show it. Our pets are good at masking when they’re in pain. The recommendation was for her bad eye to be removed. On the surface it seems like it was a tough decision, but knowing she is in pain, and that the painful eye is of no use to her anyway, it just makes sense. She should be her same old self once she’s healed from the surgery. She’ll go in next Tuesday for that procedure.

And hopefully, I can keep all insects and other foreign bodies out of my own eye. A pirate cat in the family is just fine. I’m not sure the pirate look suits me, though.

Does anyone else have any experience with one-eyed cats or dogs? Any funny stories or tips or other anecdotes?

Most of you have already seen my posts on Facebook relating to my running efforts. Since I just completed my first 8 weeks of running on the Couch to 5K (C25K) program, I thought I’d put something together about why I’m running, what the C25K program was like, and where I hope to go from here.

I’m not exactly sure why I decided to start running. I’ve been struggling with my weight and felt I needed to exercise, but I kept finding reasons to not do anything about it. I looked around one day and realized that many of the fittest people I saw around me were runners. I might have to give this a try.

I knew I was too far out of shape to just start running. Luckily, there are a number of these C25K programs for my phone. The one I found even lets you do the first week for free. With my phone, an armband, and some music, I set out! The first few runs weren’t too bad… but they also had me walking as much as I was running. This program emphasized that I warmup, cool-down, and stretch at the end. The stretching has been very cool. I’m starting to see flexibility in my legs that may not have ever been there before. Running every other day together with warming up before running also made this a sustainable program. There were many mornings when I would start out (after the day off) feeling a bit stiff. Every time after those first five minutes of walking, I was awake and ready to run.

As I progressed through the program, each new step seemed huge at the time. OMG…. it’s making me run for 5 whole minutes straight! And then the following week it was 8… and then 20… and finally 35. Starting out slow and working up to those bigger times made all the difference to me. Each increase was its own victory. Completing a program like this was an even bigger one.

I’ve lost just over 10 lbs. Running, besides burning calories directly, has made me more conscious of what I’m eating on how much of it I’m eating. It’s also gotten me to switch out much (but definitely not all) of my coffee for water. I’m also surprised by the conversations that have been started by this. Friends, family, and co-workers have all been seeing my updates on Facebook and quite a few have chatted with me about running. I even discovered a co-worker that lives in my neighborhood through this!

Going forward, I know that I can keep fitting longer and longer runs into my morning routine unless I push the alarm back to earlier and earlier. With it set at 5:30 already, I’m not really up for that. I think that means that I’ll have to cap my run duration at around 25-30 min and start working on running faster.

I do plan to run a 5K. I still haven’t found one that I want to sign up for. The Liz Hurley run in October is a likely candidate though.

This blog has been neglected lately. I’ve composed a few in my head, but never seem to sit down and type them out. They range from family stories, beauty products I’ve tried, crafty things I’ve done and want to do. So much of the family stories end up as little blurbs on twitter/fb. I’ve become a bit of a beauty product junkie in the past year, but never have really written about any of it. Crafty things end up on various social networking sites, but that’s about it. Right now, I’m not sure when regular posting will resume, though I’m not quite ready to give up on it yet. So we will see. What would you like to hear from us? Is this space now just redundant with the umpteen social networks we’re apart of? I’m definitely starting to think that it may very well be.