Wonderful walk this morning, although getting out of bed was a bit of a selling job for me on myself. It helped that Ripple's head shot up and she watched me every single second from the when the alarm went off until we actually were outside walking. It helps to know how much she enjoys our mornings. I did one more lunge on either side today. I'm taking any ramping up very slowly. I'm doing 2 reps of 10 with the leg weights, and then 2 reps of 12 lunges on both sides. That seems like plenty right now. And then for arms I'm doing two sets of 10 curls, shoulder lifts, and triceps.

We're off in a moment to get our second ultrasound. To see if we have a behemouth (sp?) baby. An extra big walnut. An uber walnut. A James and the Giant Walnut type of walnut. A Jo's Wyatt-type walnut.

I feel great this morning - healthy, happy, content. Here's to keeping the feeling the rest of today.

***

(Stace - can you believe I read the following today from someone else's journal? Isn't it strange how it dovetails with our chat?)

The Opposite Of Happiness (I deleted the author's name, I'll put it back in when I find it again)

"Oh, I’m having one of those weeks again. You’d think that between the five days in Barcelona and the unholy amounts of hurty yellow ball in the sky I’d be feeling downright groovy. But no, I’m extra cranky of late. I feel misplaced in my skin; angry when I should be sleepy; frustrated when I should be serene; wrong when I should be feeling mighty, mighty right. I have angst, in all the wrong places. I’m itching existentially and I don’t like it one bit. Why can’t I just shut up and be happy?

The answer’s simple, of course. Because life is hard. And tedious. Mostly tedious. And sometimes, I think, we’re meant to be uncomfortable. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism says that life is suffering. That I can dig, if by suffering our pal Siddhartha meant “long, numbing periods of boredom and wrenching emotional pain interspersed with brief, small moments of joy.” Of course Buddha didn’t mean that at all; he meant that life is suffering and suffering is desire and cessation of desire is the key, really, to evolving and ascending and levitating a couple of feet off the floor while you sit lotus and not-think about non-attachment and all that, but who’s got the time to meditate when life is just so goddamned full of things to be mad about? Not me.

I try to be nice, really I do. I am patient with children and the elderly. I don’t make rude noises or roll my eyes when I stand in line waiting for an excruciatingly slow checker to finish up her important conversation, not even when I have to pee. I don’t ever call Animal Control about my neighbor’s Rottweiler when it’s off leash in our shared yard, again, snarling and snapping and giving us all the howling fantods about going out the front door. I don’t step on ants or get crazy on the horn in rush hour or unleash my extensive kung fu training on the “lesbian” who fcuked my ex-husband numerous times. I carry spiders, living, to the porch where they are free to live out the remainder of their lives. I love many people, and like even more.

We all try, right, to be pleasant and pleasing, to be tolerant and compassionate. We try to appreciate the tiny gifts that we’re given. Things like a generous boss, a clear sky on a Saturday morning, a good nap under a comforter with the windows thrown open wide. We work hard-ish and we call our friends when they’re feeling blue, even when we know we’ll get 47 minutes of their melodrama and 17 seconds of actual dialogue. We should all be doing our damnedest to give help to those who can’t live their way out of a wet paper bag; we should all be generous and we should all be grateful.

Only, sometimes, we’re not. Sometimes getting through yet another fcuking day feels like figuring complicated mathematical algorithms in your head while being poked with white hot paperclips. On a tightrope. Blindfolded. Pretty hard to feel grateful when it’s all you can do to not kill everyone, really. This is probably just as it should be, too. Who says happiness is the goal, anyway? What makes serenity, enlightenment or inner peace inherently superior to doubt, resentment or disquiet? Don’t discomfort and unhappiness spur us to change our stupid, stupid ways; to fix our stupid, stupid lives? Doesn’t misery get us up and moving a whole hell of a lot faster than somnambulistic good cheer?

My chronic discontent makes me a better person. My eagerness to avoid pain, shame, torpor and sorrow has me scooting through this old world like a nasty little June bug—busy misanthropy here, unfulfilled desire there. The ferocious dream I have of stringing together brief, small moments of joy, one after another after another until I have a few weeks, or months, or a decade of contentedness is all that gets me out of bed some mornings. So maybe I am grateful; I’m glad that life is hard. Believe you me, if I were a happy person I’d never leave the house at all."