No Gym But I'm Tired Anyway

Winter Storm Grayson cancelled school on Thursday, and road conditions were icy enough that Friday went from a 3-hr delay to just plain cancelled. And I was relieved. Because even if the road was decent enough to walk down, would my son and I really want to stand across from the lake with wind chills of -9F? My husband drove off to LaGuardia to check on construction progress there while I shoveled all the areas he didn't get to. We got about 8 inches of powder. And shoveling wasn't bad. Until the wind picked up. Ugh. Even with a hat on, my ears hurt. (It's hard to wear a hat AND earmuffs simultaneously but I'll figure out how to do that if this keeps up!) I wound up wearing my fleece hat, a fleece hoodie over my hat, and the down coat hood pulled up over all of it. Normally my hands and feet suffer from the cold, and the Raynaud's doesn't help. Luckily I had purchased some alpaca socks made specifically for really cold climes. Click here to visit the website for the Ideuma Creek Alpaca farm.

Insulated socks tend to be extra thick so I can only wear the Arctic Relief Socks with my LLBean super-insulated boots that I bought some years ago. The boots had been severely discounted because they were extremely stiff and hard to walk in. It's been a few years so they're more pliable now but I don't think I'd actually trust myself to drive wearing them. (They're too thick and clunky.) With regular wool socks, I still needed to slip chemical hand-warmer packets into the toes to keep from freezing. But with these alpaca socks, my feet were perfectly fine. It's a first! I just wish I could find something similar for my hands when I'm shoveling. Even Primaloft® insulated gloves aren't quite enough for my bony little hands. Oh well...

I shoveled a path around the house and up past our hedges where I could park my car not in our driveway. It's a pain to have to warm up your car for 15 minutes just to move it so another vehicle can leave. The path around the house is for the dog who is not terrible happy about the road salt. He'll be 15 next month and I'm sure he's got arthritis in his legs. The wart on his back is getting scary. A few weeks ago it started to flake a lot and I figure it was his skin getting dry from all the cold. The wart is a lot bigger now. I gently rubbed something on it I thought would be benign: Bag Balm, which is petrolatum, lanolin and an antiseptic. The wart looks different now, and not in a good way. Some of the edges look wet on the area I actually didn't put balm on. There might be a bit of blood but it's hard to tell with his fur. He doesn't act as if it's bothering him and he still has a good appetite and shows interest in barking at cats and delivery people so I'm thinking he'll keep until it gets warmer out. If it's something not benign, then I'll be the one who'll have to make that difficult decision, just like with the last dog. It's something I know is coming, I just don't want to rush things if I don't have to.

The dog is due for a check-up in April. And he hates traveling. Especially car traveling. He doesn't like new things, and never has. I bought him a new dog bed to put by the front door and he just stood there staring at it until I put his filthy, lumpy old bed on top of it. Mind you, the old bed is akin to a large pillow half-filled with cheap poly. The new bed is a bit more firm and cushiony, but he has stubbornly resisted anything resembling a fatigue mat. (Because of his damaged back knees, he can't really lift the back feet very high and tends to trip. Hence the butt/hip harness when we go out for walks and me shoveling a path through the snow all around our house.) I've been maneuvering the beds every day to get him to lay on the new on. He's very stubborn but today he actually did lay mostly on the new one (faux sheepskin topside), with his head and nose on the old brown one. Sigh.

My son's Boy Scout troop made plans to go on a 5-mile day hike. But my son doesn't have footwear that is both insulated and waterproof. He has hiking sneakers, but I didn't trust them for walking through calf-high snow in single digit temps with a wind chill of -10 to -20 today. So he stayed home and went back to bed. However, my hubs decided it was a point of pride to show up even though he was secretly hoping the trip would be cancelled. Another dad and my son's friend did show up though. As well as the Assistant Scoutmaster who planned the trip. My hubs has been texting me sporadically about how miserable he is. I'm glad it's not me.

I tried a new nutrition drink purely because I had a coupon and the carton said it had 20 grams of protein. It didn't say it was lactose-free. It said it was gluten-free and suitable for lactose intolerant people. So I bought it and drank one. And it was sort of gross because the chocolate was kind of thick. And after I drank it, I felt a bit queasy. Like maybe it's not really suitable for people like me... Ugh. So cross Boost®High Protein off my list...

Well, at least there's some good news... I got on my home scale this morning because I'm impatient to see some sort, any sort of results from my brief foray into food tracking. And I was rewarded! My weight is down to 110.6 lbs. Body fat still high at 16.3% but significantly better than the last reading of 113.4 lbs and 17.1%... What's my goal? Will I jinx myself if I actually verbalize it? Or is this just a handy excuse not to make a concrete statement so I can backpedal later? I haven't decided yet. Give me another week...